


Told You Dirty Jokes Until You Smiled

by ChibiSquirt



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: (kinda), (not main characters), Aromantic Tony Stark, BDSM, Basically they switch around a lot, Bottom Tony Stark, First Time, Identity Porn, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Meet-Cute, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Pining, No cheating, Pining, Secret Identity, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers's Motorcycle, Stonyclunks, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Top Tony Stark, Tumblr Prompt, Virgin Steve Rogers, no infidelity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 12:32:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13434798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/pseuds/ChibiSquirt
Summary: Steve was waiting at light, casually checking out the man in the car behind him, when his phone pinged.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabrecmc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrecmc/gifts).



> For the lovely Sabrecmc, as a belated holiday present, and a thank-you for all your care with the fandom. You're a marvel! (A Marvel marvel? I'll show myself out.)

“Is this—”

Steve shifted the cord-bound receiver of the phone to rest between his shoulder and chin while pulling a small handheld device, confusingly also called a phone, closer to his face.  He read the message there one more time.

“—is this ‘You Know Who I Am’?”  

He tried not to let his confusion out _too_ clearly, but he was pretty sure it was a lost cause.  

“Apparently not,” a glib voice on the other end of the line answered.  “It’s also not, ‘I Know Who _You_ Are,’ but I would love to fix that.”

Steve flushed, remembering the incident.

He had been stopped at a red light, waiting to turn right.  

(SHIELD had issued him a driver’s licence, but there was one small problem:  Steve had never _actually_ learned to drive.  During the war, he had learned to use a motorcycle well enough, and tanks were old hat at this point, but a standard American car, in a city full of pedestrians and civilians...?  That combination still made Steve nervous.  Steve had bluffed and covered when SHIELD handed him the license, then promptly stuck to his bike whenever possible.)

So he was stopped at a red light, waiting to turn right, which it turned out was something of a _taboo_ nowadays (or maybe back then?  Steve wasn’t sure), and then he had gotten distracted by the driver of the car behind him.  The car itself was a beautiful thing, all top-down convertible in fire-engine red, gold trim and aggressive curves.  Steve wanted it, and Steve categorically did not want _any_ car.  

But it was a very nice car.  

With, Steve couldn’t help but notice, a very handsome driver.

A very handsome driver who did not understand why Steve was stopped at the red light, and was verging on irritated... until he saw that Steve was staring at him.

Then he stared back.  

Handsome Car Guy paused, looked down, did something in his lap...  Steve’s phone buzzed in his jacket.  Steve pulled it out and looked—what the heck was an “airdrop”?!!  Certainly not what Steve usually meant by the phrase—and then the light changed, and Steve drove off, and that was that.

But Handsome Car Guy really _was_ handsome, and Steve now had his number, and the “therapist” SHIELD had assigned Steve over his strenuous objections _had_ been encouraging him to get back into the world more...

Also, Steve kind of thought it might annoy Coulson.  There really wasn’t any downside to that.

So Steve was calling, but he didn’t have any idea what to _say._ “I, uh...  You were driving behind me?” he started.  “In a _very_ nice car.”

“All my cars are nice.”

“Okay,” Steve snorted, unimpressed by that.

“What, you don’t think so?”

“How many cars can you possibly need?” Steve asked automatically, then checked the impulse.  “Nevermind.  I was on a bike, you sent me your number—”

“Oh!”  The stranger’s voice warmed abruptly.  “Oh, yes, I remember you... Too transfixed by my beauty to turn—”

“That’s not how it went.”

“Really?  Sure seems like it—”

“Transfixed by the _car’s_ beauty, maybe—”

“Look, Broad Shoulders, do you want to have sex or not?”

Steve felt his breath leave his chest in an explosive rush.  

He _did,_ was the thing.  He hadn’t, before—never got the chance, and wasn’t sure he would have been surefooted enough to take it if he had gotten one—and it seemed like the sort of thing...

Well.

Working for SHIELD...  It wasn’t going to last.  He _knew_ that, the same way he knew where the shield (little S) was going to go when he threw it, the same way he knew when a tactic was going to work in the field.  He wasn’t built for subterfuge, and while SHIELD did occasionally need his particular talents and abilities, they didn’t need them often _enough_ for Steve to justify staying with them for too much longer.  

They weren’t at war, anymore.  Or at least, they weren’t at war with an enemy he could pin down.

It made a difference.  

Ideally, Steve would find an alternate purpose in life, something else to do with himself.   _Ideally._  But the thing was, there weren’t too many options out there for a guy like him.  Cop?  Definitely not.  Sports?  Pretty sure the serum counted as cheating.  Firefighter?  Maybe if the fires were supersized.  

And came with dragons.  Dragons could be good...

But failing dragons, Steve’s _other_ option was to stick with SHIELD until something better came along.  And he already knew, something better wasn’t likely to do any coming.  So he was sticking with SHIELD... until he wasn’t.

Until it killed him, basically.  Which, if his team continued to fuck up the way they had two weeks ago, was only just a matter of time.  

Steve thought it was a pretty mediocre goal to not be a virgin when that moment came.

And on the plus side, Dr. Chan—“Call me Marie,” she had said, even though they both knew Steve was never, ever going to call her Marie—Dr. Chan  _had_ said this was good for him.  Really, she would be so happy...

“Sure,” Steve said into the phone, still breathless because, where he came from, _this wasn’t something you just_ said _like that._  “I’d love to.”

“Great!  See you tonight.”

Apparently, the guy on the other end of the line—Steve really should get his name at some point—was some kind of a tech guru, because a second later, Steve’s phone lit up again, this time with a time, an address, and a guide to what he should wear.  The last line of the invite read:

_Definitely bring the bike._


	2. Chapter 2

 

So he did:  he rode the bike to the ritziest hotel in DC, took the elevator straight up to the penthouse where he was checked in by a large man in a standard suit.  Too large a man:  Steve was betting that he could’ve gotten around the bouncer even without the serum.  Although, on second thought... he probably wouldn’t have been invited here in the first place without the serum, so maybe that didn’t matter...

There was a small hallway just off the elevator with a coat closet and a little table, and then the hallway turned a corner, presumably to allow privacy for the rest of the penthouse.  The voice Steve recognized from the phone came from just out of Steve’s line of sight around that corner.  “He’s fine, Happy; let him in.”

“Your name is Happy?” Steve asked, instinctive disbelief coloring his tone.  

Happy glared.  “It’s a nickname,” he said, his New Yawky accent taking Steve by surprise with a wave of sharp homesickness.  “Why, what’s _your_ name?”

Snap decision.

“I’m Steve—from Brooklyn.”  Steve looked the man right in the eyes and smiled.  

Happy’s whole demeanor changed as he broke out in a surprised grin.  “Yeah?!  Get outta here, I used to box at Stillman’s Gym—”

_“Guys.”_

Steve broke off from Happy and walked to the end of the entryway, then turned to look into the main room.

Hot Car Guy was lounging on a couch on the far right wall like Adam getting ready to receive the spark of life.  Only he looked a lot better than Adam did, even under Michaelangelo’s brush:  he was darker, leaner, his body more trim but still strongly muscled.  His eyes were deep and sharp. _Intelligent,_ Steve thought, and something kicked into high gear in his stomach, churning with excitement.  This was a man to be careful around.  Indolence and wealth or no, this man was dangerous.  

“Just bein’ friendly,” Steve said.  His voice was mild, really.  It _was._  “You got somethin’ against bein’ friendly?”  They had a word for this, these days; maybe they’d had it back then, too, but no one had ever told Steve about it if they did.  It was called _code-switching,_ breaking out different ways of being, patterns of speech, depending on who you were... well.  Who you was talkin’ to.  Steve’s ma’d made real sure he could talk like a swell if he needed it, so he’d never had no problems with that, but Bucky’d made real sure Steve could fit in with the guys, too, and it’d saved Steve’s lousy neck more’n once.  There was a lot more work fer a guy what didn’t look like a threat to nobody if’n he was maybe a little more willing to get overlooked, now and then.

But it made Steve sound absolutely nothing like Captain America, and that, too, was useful.

“I have nothing against being friendly.”   _Not_ a New Yorker, or at least not the part of New York Steve was familiar with; maybe the nicer parts, the swells.  Boarding schools and polo matches.  “I’m very friendly.  I’d like be very friendly with _you—_ what’s your last name, Steve?”

Steve let his eyebrows rocket up.  “Rogers,” he answered, cause he hadn’t ever been ashamed of who he was.  “What’s yours?”

Now _Happy’s_ eyebrows were up.  So were Hot Car Guy’s.  Apparently, Steve really _was_ supposed to “know who I am.”

Something golden and delighted lit in the back of Hot Car Guy’s eyes, and then something much more devilish curled up the corners of his mouth inside his neatly-trimmed goatee.  “Happy, you can go.”

“Oh, lordy.”  

Steve wasn’t supposed to have heard that one; Happy mumbled it under his breath as he brushed past, clambering reluctantly into the elevator.  Steve had been right about how fast Happy didn't move.  Steve watched the elevator doors close, then turned his attention back to the man in the loose-fitting shirt and the tight-fitting jeans.

Outside the hotel, the noise of the city rose up:  the honks of traffic, shouts of pedestrians.  The howl of wind that came from the room being so far up.  Inside the penthouse, though, the only noise came from the fire chuckling in its little grate.  Gas fire, Steve thought, listening for the hiss.  He knew it had to be there; the hearth wasn’t deep enough for wood.  He could just barely hear it, the sound that today meant _luxury_ and in his youth had meant _fire_ and _death_.  

Dark eyes watched Steve thoughtfully.  “Don’t know who I am, huh?”

Steve smiled wryly.  “Not until you tell me,” he said.

One blink.  Two.  “My name’s Tommy... have a seat?”

Steve shook his head and crossed his arms, leaning against the wall.  He was comfortable, now—probably because he was about to get into a fight.  “You’re lying.”

“How would you know?”  Not-Tommy said it quickly, spinning out the words like spider silk, like the closing door of a trap.

Steve stuck his arm in that trap door and lifted.  He was strong, now; he could do that.  “I don’t have to know the truth to know when I’m not hearing it, I’ve encountered bullshit before.”  He frowned.  “Why does it matter to you, anyway?  You don’t want me to have your _name?”_

“I don’t like you claiming something that isn’t true,” Not-Tommy said.  He was frowning, too, though, in the manner of a man who was beginning to suspect Steve wasn’t what he had assumed.  Steve had grown pretty familiar with that look over the years.  “...It’s Stark,” he said eventually.  “Tony Stark.”

Steve blinked, startled.  “Oh,” he said, doing some rapid thinking.  “I... have heard of you, actually.”

But Stark’s face was clearing.  “Yeah,” he said, “there we go.”  He watched Steve think about it as Steve watched him watch, and tried to figure out exactly how messed up this was.

There was no way Tony knew who he was.  The name _Steve Rogers_ had been classified at the highest levels, and anyway, from what Fury had said, Tony and his father had never been close.  

But Steve and Howard had been friends—solid friends, the kind who didn’t talk every day but knew they could count on the other when the chips came down; Howard had been far from perfect, but then, so was Steve.  And Tony was said to be very similar indeed to his father... only _more so._

He was certainly more attractive, for one thing.  

Not that there was anything wrong with Howard; in fact, Howard had pulled more than his share of women.  Steve had often thought that one of the reasons Howard respected Peggy so much was that she had consistently refused to join those ranks.  But Tony was...

Tony was just... _more._

Both men had hard eyes and soft mouths, but Tony’s mouth was more agile, his eyes more sly, than Howard’s had been.  Both men were slight of stature and well fit, but Tony’s build hinted more strongly at agile strength.  Both men were intelligent, but Tony was revolutionizing the world at the same time as he was running a thriving weapons company.  And both men obviously had plenty of sexual experience, but if Steve were going to ask one of them to take him apart... somehow, despite only knowing him through a five-minute phone call and an introduction, Steve still, on a gut-level, picked Tony as the Stark would would do the thing right.

That was what decided him, in the end.  It wasn’t because Tony was Howard’s son; it was _in spite_ of it.  That was... “Alright.”

“Still interested?”  Tony’s head was cocked to the side, his eyes intent as he watched Steve.  

Steve swallowed to moisten his throat.  “Yeah,” he coughed, “yeah.  I...”  He tipped his head to the side, indicating the couch.  “You okay with me coming over there?”

Tony smiled, sharp and pleased-looking.  “Make yourself at home; mi sofa es su sofa, et cetera.”

Steve walked over and sat on the couch, upright on the other side from Tony.  

Tony looked nonplussed.  

Steve flushed and scooted closer, hands clenching at his sides.

“You know you don’t have to do this, right?” Tony asked.  He wasn’t frowning, that was the worst part of the question:  he just looked concerned, with a tiny, baby wrinkle forming between his eyebrows as if  he thought Steve might feel _coerced_ or something.  Like he was worried for Steve, or if he wasn’t worried _for_ Steve then he was definitely worried _about_ him.

“I know,” Steve said hastily.  “I don’t have to, I—want to, alright?”  He met Tony’s eyes, saw the genuine concern, the softness under the brusque exterior.  He sucked a breath in past parted lips, surprised—almost shocked—by the gentleness of it.  

Whatever he said next, it would have to be true, he thought.  That was the only way he could answer a concern like that.  No, _more_ than true:  _honest._ Steve swallowed, trying to come up with something he could possibly say that counted.  

He breathed in, slow and shaky, then let the breath out again.  “Since I...  Since I—came home.  I haven’t... wanted.”

Tony nodded, still watching him with that careful, too-careful expression.  “Anybody?”

“Any _thing,”_ Steve corrected.  “Food is... well, it’s too salty _and_ it’s too bland...  Clothes, cars, books—one of my favorite novels came out with a whole mess of sequels, and I can’t get past the first three chapters.”

“Ah.”  Tony nodded, breaking his gaze at last.  “And people, too.”  He didn’t sound like he was asking.

“Yeah.  Except...”  Steve let some of the tension ease out of his back, sinking into the plush leather cushions, remembering.  “Then I saw you.  You were in that fancy car, but you looked so _comfortable,_ and the sun was hitting your hair and you looked so _warm,_ and just for a minute... I _did_ want.  Still do, really.”  He shook his head, rolling his skull along the top of the couchback, before sitting up and trying to explain the next part.  “Even the things I do want, though, I don’t...  It’s like... I can’t...”

“‘Wishing you had an apple is a lot easier than reaching out and picking one,’” Tony said like he was quoting something.  

Steve blinked, taken aback. _“Yes,”_ he blurted.  “Yeah, that’s it exactly!”

Tony rolled his eyes.  “That’s _depression,_ Steve.  You need to _treat_ that, not hit up handsome strangers to get laid.”

“That’s what my _therapist_ said,” Steve shot back.  He winced mentally at the way he had sneered the word _therapist._ Dr. Chan call-me-Marie wasn’t _that_ bad; Steve just loathed her with every bone of his body, that was all.  Minor inconvenience, really.  But SHIELD had said he had to go.  Steve shook his head.  “I’m here because she said to, uh, try anyway.  Reaching out, I mean.  Try to pick some fruit, even if it’s hard work.”

“I’m not sure I like being called a fruit.”  But Tony said it quickly, lightly; it was only banter, not like a guy woulda said it back in Steve’s time.

Tony swung his weight forward, reaching for the glass of amber liquid on the table.  He took a sip—the only movement he’d made all night that seemed nervous—and then put it back, sitting up again to face Steve.  “You said ‘when you got back...’  You’re a soldier?”

Steve nodded, because it was true.  “I was, yeah.”

“Afghanistan?”

“I can’t tell you that.”  Thank god; Steve had grown to love that phrase by now.

Tony nodded again.  He reached forward again, took another sip of his drink—whiskey, Steve could smell it now—and then set it down again with a decisive click.  “Well,” he said, straightening up.  “Do you kiss?”

Steve felt himself blushed. _“Please,”_ he blurted.  

He leaned in too quickly, almost banged his head against Tony’s.  Pulled back, tried again, slower.  “Easy,” Tony said.  His voice was low and soothing, and something hard and tight at the base of Steve’s spine relaxed when he heard it.  “Easy, Steve.  I’ve got you.”  His hands came up to cradle Steve’s face, and he set the pace of the kiss, slow and endless.  His mouth seemed to move at half-speed, tasting and steady.  Steve felt the moan building in his throat and let it come out, vibrating between them.  Tony smiled against his mouth and deepened the kiss, just so, pressing closer and opening his lips until Steve, feeling terrified and brave all at once, reached out the tip of his tongue to taste.  

Tony hummed happily and—it was like he was sucking Steve in, coaxing, encouraging.  Steve felt bolder, and leaned closer, wrapping one hand around around Tony’s waist the way he had seen soldiers do in the pictures, pulling Tony closer until their chests were pressed together.  His skin tingled at the pressure and warmth of contact.  

Tony broke his mouth away, gasping.  Steve was gasping, too.  

“Steve.”  That was all Tony said for a moment, chest heaving.  Then he pulled back a fraction, looked up into Steve’s eyes.  “You’re a quick learner—”

“Thanks.”

“—but you _are_ learning.  Are you...?  Looking at you this seems impossible, but...  Have you somehow never done this before?”

Steve flushed, all the blood that had been racing south abruptly reversing gears and setting out for his face and neck, instead.  “That obvious?”

“It’s not a bad thing.”  Tony hurled those words out so fast their tires spun.  “Not bad at all, I just...  Why?”

Steve laughed, a bitter huff of breath.  “Why anything, these days.”

“Forget that—why _me?”_

Steve stood stiffly, reaching for his keys which he had tossed on the table earlier.  “It’s fine,” he said.  His voice sounded awful to his own ears, stiff and offended.  “You don’t have to—I’m sorry.”

“You sound less sorry than you are pissed off—no, don’t go, it’s just my mouth, Jesus.  Never mind my mouth, it says terrible things.  No, but for real, Steve.  Mr. Mysterious Assignment—you do know my clearance level is probably higher than yours, right?”

“It isn’t,” Steve said with certainty.

“Whatever.  Point is:  there’s nothing wrong with being a virgin.  But _something_ inspired you to keep that status, and _something else_ is driving you to change it now, and I want to make sure you’re not going to regret it.  That’s all.”  Tony leaned back against the sofa again, back in control.  Calm.  Measured.  It was a good look on him.  “I don’t like it when people regret having sex with me; it’s bad for my reputation.”

Steve thought about it, about what he could say.  “I changed my mind... because I was wrong,” he said finally.  “I was waiting because... because you’re supposed to, I guess.  I wanted it to be special.  _The right partner.”_  Steve had really said that phrase, once upon a time.  He had really opened his mouth, and sent those words tumbling over his lips.  And he had _meant_ them.  What an _idiot._

Tony watched him, thoughtful once more, one hand plucking restlessly at the fold of the leather on the armrest.  “Why is that wrong?” he asked.  “I remember my first time—well.  Mostly remember.  Nothing... it wasn’t special; kind of wish it were, though.”

“It’s wrong because... because it’s _waiting.”_

Steve squeezed his eyes closed, turned away.  He couldn’t look at Tony, not for this next bit.  

“I died,” he said.  His voice was raw-sounding.  It still hurt.  Coming back and finding that everyone else was gone?  That had hurt even more.  “There was a plane crash; I was in the wreckage for...  a long time.  Very long.  And I wasn’t awake when the found me.  So one moment, I’m there, thinking ‘this is it’ and listing off every regret I ever had, and the next...  Bright lights.  Bird song.”  He paused, forcing down the rage.  His hands were clenched, he noticed, pale against the dark leather.  “I woke up, and there was a _game_ on the radio.  A pretty little nurse told me how _happy_ they had been to _find_ me,” he told Tony, trying not to spit the words.  “And nothing hurt, anymore.  Isn’t that lucky?  I missed the painful part.”

Tony snorted and understood.  He came to his feet, holding out a hand towards Steve.  “Drugs’ll do that for you,” he informed Steve.  “Good shit.  C’mon, this way—through the doorway here, big guy, let’s move.”

Steve followed obediently.  “Where are we going?”

But he didn’t much care what the answer would be, and he didn’t add anything else.  That was a bad sign, the not saying anything; it wasn’t like him, he knew.  He just couldn’t think of anything _to_ say, was all.  Objecting to Tony’s plans seemed like an awful lot of effort.  A lot of things did, these days.  

This whole damn _whim_ was starting to feel like a lot of effort.  It had seemed so simple when he thought about it that afternoon:  show up, get his cherry popped, leave.  Easy.

Tony wasn’t easy, though.  Tony... Tony seemed to think about things.  Steve would have to be careful not to give too much away.  It was too easy to trust, right now, to easy to slip into complaisance...

“Bedroom,” Tony answered shortly, and that was a relief:  they were still going to do this, at least.  Tony still thought he was attractive, even if he _was_ bluer than a long-haired dog in a rainstorm.  That counted for something, right?  It had to.

Steve followed Tony into the bedroom.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Infinity War Weekend, y'all! Who else has experienced a sudden, sharp craving for AU's??? You should read this one, this chapter's all porn. 
> 
> Many thanks to the ever-lovely, ever-talented Newsbypostcard who is slowly dragging me kicking and screaming (and clutching my ellipses) towards being a better writer.

Tony’s bedroom was as spartanly chic as the rest of the suite, rich in a way that came from the absence of stuff.  No cliche impressionist prints on the wall for Tony Stark—oh, no.  All the lines in the room were clean and simple.  The tables were topped with stone, not wood, and the bed had actual blankets instead of a coverlet.  The bed looked comfortable, too, nice and firm, and it was large enough to practice lawn-bowling on.  Tony used a dimmer switch by the door to set the overhead lights to a partial half-light, giving the room a moody twilight air.

“You have any preferences?”

“Haven’t really done enough to form any,” Steve admitted.  He finished looking around the room and then brought his eyes back to Tony, who was standing in front of the bed, his back to Steve, taking off his watch.  His jeans were still tight, and just as deliciously form-fitting across the rear as Steve had hoped they would be.  It was a hell of a view.

Steve had a momentary thought for how Howard would have felt about this, and then firmly dismissed it.  There was no way of knowing, since Howard was dead, but the man had always had an inappropriate sense of humor.  He’d probably think this was funny, or at least ironic.

And there was no sense borrowing trouble, as Mrs. Barnes used to say.

“I’m pretty sensitive,” Steve offered, bringing his thoughts back to what they were doing.  “In general, I mean; not just touch, but smells get me, too, sometimes.  And I, uh...” He coughed.  “...self-stimulation... doesn’t take long.  Usually.  And I can go again pretty quick, too.  Don’t know if that changes anything...”

“I wouldn’t say it does.”  Tony turned and stripped off his shirt in one motion, revealing a smooth expanse of well-muscled chest.  He must work out; he had a boxer’s physique—bantamweight, but heavier through the arms. “Confirms, really.  Well, it’s your first time, I want it to be something special, so—”

“You really don’t have to do that.”

“—do you want to fuck me?”  Tony paused in the act of taking off his pants.  “What? Don’t have to what, what am I not—wait, not making it special?!  Oh, please.  I’d be a disgrace to non-straight men everywhere if I let you have anything less than a completely sterling first experience.  You _do_ know you’re a specimen, right?”

Steve snorted.  “I know I’m a _mess.”_

“But you’re a beautiful mess!”  Tony grinned, the flash of white teeth framed attractively by his dark beard.  “That makes you artistic! Come here, Jesus, stop standing halfway across the room—”

Steve flushed, realizing he had stopped only a foot inside the door.  “Sorry,” he said, moving towards the bed. “I haven’t—”

“Done this before?  Yeah, figured that out.  Come _here,_ Steve; get on the bed.”

Tony had left his jeans on, unbuttoned and deliciously tempting.  He sat on the bed and patted the space beside him in obvious invitation.  Steve felt enormous as he accepted, awkward and bumbling.  He was hyper-aware of every inch of his bulk dwarfing the smaller man as he turned.  

His gaze fell on Tony’s mouth.  It was a good mouth, wide and mobile; a little too smart for sheer prettiness, maybe, but all the more attractive for that, smirking with knowledge of all kinds of things.  Steve brought his hand up, tracing the edges of the beard, feeling the prickles of it against the pads of his fingers.  Strange; he would have thought he would be blushing by now, but the embarrassment wasn’t there...  All he felt was a straightforward acceptance.  A sense that, for him, this _was_ the right time, the right partner, after all.  

Steve smiled.  He leaned forward, brushing his mouth against Tony’s, licking at the seam of his lips the way Tony had coaxed him to do earlier, on the couch.  He had liked that, he thought, liked the feeling of taking over, of being in someone else’s space.  He slid his hand down Tony’s neck to his shoulder and moved the other to mirror it, pulling Tony close.  Their tongues slid slickly together and Tony sucked, light and friendly.  Steve’s hands clenched involuntarily, and his toes curled with pleasure.

Tony pulled back with a bitten noise.  “Easy, there...” He rolled out his shoulders and Steve, feeling apologetic for the red handprints he could see rising to the skin, ducked his head.  

“Sorry,” he whispered.  

“You’re fine.  On edge?”

Steve made a sound that wasn't really a laugh.  “You could say that.  Nerves, mostly.”

“No problem—I get it.  Here, turn around.”

Steve felt gooseflesh pop up on his neck and shoulders, but he turned his back on Tony anyway.  He tried not to twitch at the feeling of Tony’s eyes, Tony’s breath, on his back.

“That’s it...  Here, I’ll just—”

The first touch of Tony’s hands was light, just fingers walking over the surface of Steve’s shirt.  It lifted off again, and then Tony’s hands settled on his shoulders, thumbs a bare inch apart over Steve’s spine. _He could choke me,_ Steve thought, his stomach clenching.  His hands were right there, he would just have to reach around—but he wouldn’t do that.  He _wouldn’t—_ he was a civilian, and anyway, Steve had left all that behind.  Still, his heart was pounding—too fast; he was seconds away from sweating.   _He’s a civilian, damnit!  This isn’t the Front, you’re here because you want to be—and he’s a_ civilian, _you idiot—!_

Tony’s hands moved as he began to rub softly at the back of Steve’s neck, pulling a gasp out of Steve for more reason than one.  Long, powerful thumbs dug in, pulling the muscle, scoring lines of delicious, aching warmth across Steve’s back.  They rubbed pleasant friction into Steve’s shoulders, eased the tension out of his neck and spine, sending waves of relaxation into his sides and lower back.  It took a few minutes, but not long, before Tony was asking in a low voice, “Do you want to take your shirt off?”

Steve’s pulse kicked up again—just stage fright this time, he realized.  He swallowed it down. “Sure,” he said, then tugged at his shirt, starting to strip the way he had hundreds of times in the army.  

“Over the chair is fine,” Tony told him, answering the question before he could ask.  

Steve nodded and tossed it, deliberately not bothering to fold it first.  As soon as the shirt left his hands, he started unbuttoning his jeans, too, hands moving quickly.  

Tony’s hand came down over his.  The position was strangely intimate, like a dance; Tony was still sitting behind him on the edge of the bed, and his arm had to wrap all the way around Steve in an motion like an embrace in order to reach.  “You don’t have to,” Tony said.  His voice was warm and soothing, and his breath puffed air against the side of Steve’s neck, sending Steve shuddering. “Not until you’re ready.  I’m pretty good at this—” Tony was smiling; Steve could hear it in his voice.  “—pretty sure I could manage without you taking _anything_ off.  So.  No pressure.”

This was consideration, Steve realized.  He blinked, rapidly, hand tightening over his belt.  This was what a considerate lover looked like.  Tony was concerned that he was rushing Steve, and so he was slowing things down, taking it easy on him.  He was being cautious, and careful, with Steve, as if Steve were something precious.

How long had it been since someone cared whether Steve was comfortable or not?  And how long had it been since Steve had noticed?

“Thanks,” Steve said, swallowing all the emotion down until what came out was a sort of dry recognition.  “But... I was in the army; I don’t have a problem with stripping down.”

“And maybe my standard is just a bit higher than _don’t have a problem with,”_ Tony said sharply.  

Steve jumped at the sound of it.  For a second, Tony had sounded like Steve’s ma, telling off Sue Southerby over how she treated Frannie O’Connell.  That was the most aggressive thing Tony had said by far tonight, and, of things, it had come from him not wanting Steve to... regret.  

From wanting Steve to want this.

No problems, there, Steve thought.  He smiled. “This isn’t the part I’m nervous about,” he said dryly, “and even the parts I _am_ nervous about are still things I want to do.”  He stood briefly off the bed and shoved his pants down, kicking out of them and his boxers in one motion before sitting back down again, his back to Tony once more.

Tony didn’t answer, but he went back to massaging Steve, rubbing in soothing motions out from the center to the sides of Steve’s back, from the top down, and then further downward, still.  He dug into the divot above Steve’s ass with his thumbs and like magic, a whole block of tension let go.

Steve moaned, loud in the silence of the room, and only then realized he had been silent throughout most of the proceedings.

Tony’s hands stilled, resting low on Steve’s hips, right where the waistband of Steve’s shorts usually was.  “Good sound?”

“Yes,” Steve said, “very.  I—can we kiss again?”

“Of course!”  Tony sounded surprised, but when Steve turned and suited action to word, he went along with it readily enough.  He leaned into the kiss, one hand anchoring him against Steve’s hip, the other running lightly across Steve’s shoulder, drifting up his neck.  Steve shivered as Tony toyed with the fine hair at there, lightly brushing it one way, then in the other direction.  It was an achingly light sensation, and Steve groaned as he leaned into the kiss, sucking a little harder against the sweet, slick closeness of Tony’s mouth.  

Tony broke away first this time, gasping and pressing his cheek to Steve’s.  “Quick learner,” he said. “Doing fine.  Just fine.”

“Oh, good.”  Steve breathed deep, taking in the smells of Tony—cologne, and some kind of mechanical smell; grease, maybe?—then nuzzled upward to push a kiss to Tony’s temple.  He let his lips linger, enjoying the feel of soft skin as Tony’s dark hair ruffled under his breath.  When he spoke, he could imagine that the words were sent directly into Tony’s mind through his temple, passing through skin and bone without stopping by the ears.  “Is it—do you want to...  I mean.  Um.  Bed?”

Tony shuddered against him, his hands tightening.  “Yeah.” His voice was gravelly, and Steve found himself grinning at the sound.  Tony tipped them sideways, bouncing them off the mattress, and Steve let himself be moved, falling easily underneath him, pinned.

Tony kissed him again and ran a hand down his chest, humming happily.  He thumbed Steve’s nipple and Steve jumped—the sensation had been electric.  Startling, but also exciting, like there was a well of potential in him and Tony had just tapped it.  When Tony asked him, “Good?” he nodded enthusiastically.

“Yeah, that was—uh, more?”

“Gorgeous—”  Tony smiled widely down at him.  “—it would be my _pleasure.”_

Tony went to work on Steve’s chest, thumbs and clever fingers teasing Steve’s nipples and dancing across his stomach, mouth moving a hot line across Steve’s collarbone.  It lit a fire in Steve’s chest, surges of intensity that made him throb.  Steve moaned and leaned into the sensations.  His muscles tightened, abs and pecs lifting as if to present themselves to Tony’s hands and mouth.  Tony hummed again, a surprised and delighted sound, at the movement.

He licked over Steve’s nipple again and again, the feeling getting more and more intense each time he did it, building from an almost-nothing lack of sensation, to nice, to _amazing._ Steve was on the edge of thrashing, of bucking Tony off from the sheer _overwhelmingness_ of it, when Tony’s teeth closed gently around the abused bud.  It did something to Steve’s brain, that feeling, turned all his blood to soda.  He went limp, pliable under Tony, an embarrassingly needy noise coming out of him without any intention on his part.  It was like he was floating, like some kind of a dream—the best kind of dream.

He raised his hand to Tony’s cheek, movements slow like moving through syrup, and swiped his thumb over the soft skin of Tony’s cheekbone.  Tony pulled his mouth from Steve’s chest— _no!—_ and kissed his palm, then sank a nipping bite high on Steve’s stomach.  Steve melted again, pushing his fingers into Tony’s hair.  That was soft, too, silky and thick against Steve’s fingers.  He carded his hands through it as his head thrashed from side to side, mindless under Tony’s working mouth.

Tony moved on, further south, nipping at the indent above Steve’s hip, and now, _now_ Steve knew where he was going with it, what he was doing.  It ripped another large moan out of Steve, that knowledge, the anticipation and shock of it.  “Please,” he heard himself say, “please, please Tony—yes, yes, please, please, _do it—”_

Tony stopped moving, not abruptly, but like parking a car, slowing to a stop and then shifting gear.  He pulled back, looking down at Steve, his eyes greedy, sharp and dark, and glowing with pleased accomplishment.  For a moment, Steve couldn’t figure it out, why he was—why did he _look_ like that?  But then he he realized his back was arched, and from there he noticed that his head was arched back—he was looking at Tony through eye almost entirely closed in pleasure—and his throat was exposed, every inch of his body pressing itself upwards towards Tony in supplication.  The knowledge of what he was doing, what he must look like, burned through him.  He flushed, gasping in humiliation, but the sting of it was only more pleasure, and he tipped his head up to meet Tony’s eyes squarely.

“Please,” he said again, deliberately this time, voice hoarse but enunciated clearly.  Steve had led men into battle, and this was unmistakably the same thing: an order, no bones about it, no matter how politely he phrased it.

Tony smiled shark-like and tipped his head, a movement with absolutely nothing of deference to it.  “Your wish is my command,” he said smugly.

He fished a condom out of the nightstand one-handed, had it rolled down Steve’s penis faster than Steve could’ve even gotten it out of the packaging.  He dropped his mouth down without teasing, lips wrapping around the head of Steve’s cock like a lollipop, obscene and amazing.  It was wet, tight and scorching.  “Christ,” Steve slurred, “so good! Jesus, Tony, that’s amazing— _oh God!”_

Tony had moved his head down, taking Steve down to midshaft.  He wrapped his hand around Steve’s base, sucked hard and bobbed his head.  Steve felt fevered, pressure rising into his head and neck, tension ratcheting into his shoulders with every movement of Tony’s head.  His eyes rolled back in his head of their own accord, and he groaned low, trying to hold on.

Tony popped his head up, looking at him with a strangely gentle grin.  “You can come,” he said, voice still quick and light, but not dismissive.  “I want you to.  You said you can go again, right? So come in my mouth, and then by the time I’m ready for you, you’ll be hard enough to fuck me.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought this all through.”  Steve’s stomach hurt from how hard he was clenching it, curled up to watch because he couldn’t quite look away from the glisten of spit on Tony’s lower lip.

“I’m usually said to be good at that.”

“Which?  Thinking, or sex?”

Tony smirked.  “Yes,” he said pointedly, and Steve gave up, collapsing back to the bed with a groan as Tony dropped his gaze towards Steve’s cock again.  

“One more thing—”  Tony slid his thumb up and down the underside of Steve’s cock, nudging up against the frenulum and driving Steve crazy with the need to thrust into his grip.  “You can pull my hair, if you want—you were touching it, earlier.  That’s good.  I like that.”

Steve moved to do it immediately, burying his hands in the sleek, dark waves.  He got a wide grip and pulled, and Tony moaned around his cock so immediately that it couldn’t be anything other than a direct reaction.  He really _must_ like this, then.  Steve alternated hands, clenching and unclenching rhythmically as Tony’s mouth worked him hard and fast, pushing forward until Steve’s cockhead nudged the back of his throat.  God, it was good! There was _heat_ and _suction_ and—

“I’m gonna—!”

He came into the condom and Tony sucked him right through it, tongue pressing up against him hard and slick and perfect.

Afterwards, Steve floated, his hands absently releasing their tight hold on Tony’s hair, petting apologetically at the scalp.  He ran his fingers around Tony’s eyes and cheeks, petting him with trembling fingertips.

Tony still hadn’t pulled back, hadn’t let Steve’s deflating cock fall from his lips yet.  He lingered, mouth warm around Steve, tonguing absently around the head of the condom—moving the jism around inside it, Steve realized.  He swallowed, feeling a gut-clenching wave of heat at the perversity of it.

When Tony did pull off, he didn’t go far.  Just set his cheek down on Steve’s hip and rolled the condom off.  He pressed kisses to Steve’s skin and sucked Steve’s thumb into his mouth when Steve happened to get a hand close enough.  “Mmm...” Tony’s hum sounded happy, almost as blissed out as Seve was, although that couldn’t be right.  Tony hadn’t come yet, and had done all the hard work, after all.  “Mmm, this is good.  You don’t have to keep going if you’re going to fall asleep instead, by the way.  You can nap if you want, this is not a high-pressure situation.”

Steve frowned, although it was a lazy, absent sort of frown.  The kind of expression a man makes in the morning before he’s gone for his run.  “Don’t want to nap...” he said thoughtfully. “Don’t want to move for a minute, either, though.”

Tony wiggled beside him, fidgeting until his own cock formed a hard, pleasant pressure against Steve’s thigh.  Steve would have thought it was a message, except that when Tony said, “This is fine,” his voice was thick with such satisfaction that Steve really couldn’t doubt he was happy with not doing anything for a minute.  It seemed a bit odd, but if Tony wanted to lie there with a hard-on so thick and solid it _must_ be painful, well...  Steve wasn’t exactly going to deny him.  

Tony seemed to like it, _really_ like it.  Steve would touch his hair, face, ears, or neck, any of them, and Tony would hum in happiness, pressing into his hands.  Steve lost long minutes just playing with him, touching him lightly as you might hold a blown egg.  God, it was—Tony was _wonderful_ like this, responding to Steve’s touch like Steve was working some kind of magic—which Steve knew perfectly well he was not, but Tony pressed into his hands anyway.  He rustled closer against Steve’s leg, planted small kisses on Steve’s wrists and chest, making happy wordless noises.  It was beautiful, and powerfully erotic; Steve was thickening again, hardening just from the sight of Tony nuzzling his fingers.  

“Are you—”  Steve stopped to clear his throat.  “You said earlier, you wanted me to...?”

“Nnnn, God yes,” Tony answered immediately.  His eyes were hazy with pleasure, but not mindless.  He crawled up the length of Steve’s body on his knees, leaning over him to get to the nightstand drawer again.  “Sorry—got distracted.”

“Sorry for what?  It was nice.” Steve ran his hand down Tony’s side, observing the play of smooth muscle over Tony’s ribs.  He cupped Tony’s ass, feeling overly bold, but also certain that Tony wouldn’t mind.

He didn’t.  “God, yes, Steve—feel free to cop any and all feels, by the way.”  He gave the bottle a little flip as he got it out of the drawer before popping the cap and drooling some slick fluid into his palm.  Steve squeezed experimentally as Tony slicked his fingers.  Tony pushed back into his grip, back arching.  Steve changed his grip, turned the squeeze into a rub, and got a happy moan and half-closed eyes from Tony in response.

Tony slung one arm over Steve’s shoulder, hanging on as he leaned forward at the waist and reached behind himself left-handed.  His shoulder worked for one second, then two, before Steve stopped him with an open-handed slap to the ass—a gentle one. “Hey,” Steve said, “can I see?  Is that okay?”

Tony looked baffled.  “Of course you can see, but did you want to?”  He shifted his weight to move, but hesitated before completing the movement, waiting on Steve’s answer.

Steve swallowed.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I wanna watch.”  

Tony shivered and turned obediently, moving around until he was kneeling with one knee on each side of Steve’s thighs.  He bent over and rested his weight on the arm propped next to Steve’s calf before working his fingers into himself again, one and then immediately a second.  His fingers caught and tugged on his hole and Steve couldn’t look away from it, couldn’t tear his eyes from the place where the flesh turned inward.  Slick glistened around Tony’s hole and all over his hand to the wrist; his cheeks spread naturally from the position, but Steve still couldn’t resist spreading them a little further himself, holding Tony open to his gaze.  

“Oh, _fuck!”_ Tony’s voice was unexpectedly loud.  His weight-bearing arm bent, tilting his chest down and his ass up, and he pulled his fingers out crooked, so that the clinging muscle of his asshole stretched and deformed around them.  He fucked himself on his fingers again and again, then pulled his hand free and held it out to Steve.

“Lube,” he ordered.  Steve searched beside the pillow for where the bottle had gone, found it and squirted some over Tony’s hand.  He watched as Tony returned his fingers to his hole; he was using three of them, now, his two fingers and his thumb, easing them in and then spreading them, stretching himself open.  Steve hesitated, then poured another stream of the liquid directly on Tony’s ass, watching it spread over the gloriously round cheeks and drip down the crack into the hole.  Tony moaned again at the touch of it.  Steve tossed the bottle aside, then gripped Tony’s ass-cheeks again, rubbing with first his thumbs, then his palms, until Tony’s whole ass was greasy with the stuff and Steve’s hands were thoroughly coated.

Steve jacked himself once, twice, so hard by now that his cock was curving up towards his stomach.  He kept one hand on Tony’s butt as he reached for the nightstand with the other, fishing around in the drawer Tony had pulled the condom out of until he had grabbed the box.  He dumped it on the bed beside him, got out a packet.  He tried to open it three times, his hands slipping off the plastic, before he gave up and tossed it up beside Tony. “Here—you do it.”

“Can’t, doing this,” Tony answered, but he moved to pick up the condom with his teeth anyway.  Steve felt himself drip precome at the sight.

Steve knocked Tony’s hand away.  _“I’ll_ do this; you do that.”

Steve had never done this before—had never done any of this before—but it hadn’t looked complicated.  Tony had been using three fingers, but Steve sunk just his thumb in, first.  Testing the waters.  Tony shuddered as he pushed in, and Steve felt it not only under his free hand, but around his thumb, as well.  

“Oh, _shit!”_ he muttered.

It was unbelievably sensual.  Tony’s hole was clinging around his thumb, not tight but close, elastic—probably because Tony had just stretched it out.  He was wet with lube, slick and so hot inside, hotter by far than Steve had expected.  Steve groaned.  He pulled free, swiped his hand through the lube again, and pushed back in, this time with his index and middle fingers.  The passage was tighter now, but Tony still stretched easily to accommodate him.  He cried out when Steve pressed inside, babbling mindlessly as Steve slid his fingers out again.  Steve liked that, needed it; he fucked in and out with his fingers, again and again, basking in the urgent sex noises until Tony whirled and fell on him, trying to get the condom on.  

Steve wrapped his hands around Tony’s to guide him in and held them so that they rolled the condom down together.  When it was on, he pulled Tony’s hands off him and kissed the palms, then the wrists; looked up at Tony, and kissed his mouth, too, fucking him with his tongue the way Tony had liked so much earlier.  Tony bit at his mouth and scratched at his chest, pulling him close and simultaneously trying to turn around again.

Steve didn’t want that.  He couldn’t have said why not, but—he wanted Tony face to face with him, wanted to be able to watch Tony react.  He kissed Tony’s brow, then his eyelid when it fluttered shut, licking along the sensitive skin there with the full width of his tongue so that Tony shuddered, filthy and wet.  “Do you have to?” he muttered. “Turn around, I mean.  Can we do it like this, instead?” He drew his mouth sideways, swirled his tongue around Tony’s ear so that Tony jerked and shouted again.  

“Oh, fff—YES, yes we can, that’s—oh fuck—yes—yes—FUCK!”  

Steve licked the soft nub of the earlobe clasped between his teeth.  

“Yes, I can—lie back, I’ll ride you?  Come on, Steve, say that’s okay—”

“That’s fine.”  Lying on his back, there was little chance Steve would accidentally use too much force—and the mental image of Tony riding him was too good to ignore.  “Yeah, come on.”

He went back fast, resting propped up on his elbows, watching Tony as Tony got into position.  He felt the pressure of both cheeks on his cockhead as Tony lined him up, had to fight to keep his eyes open because it felt _so good,_ and then Tony was pushing down, impossibly hot, wet and tight around him, and Steve gasped, and gasped, and gasped.  

They both cried out when the head of Steve’s cock passed the tight ring of muscle.  The slow slide inside of Tony was heaven, slick and inexorable.  There was nowhere for Steve to go during it, not lying flat as he was, not without shoving up into Tony and maybe hurting him.  Just as well; he didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Tony paused when Steve was all the way inside him—stopping to admire the mess he had reduced Steve to, maybe.  Steve clenched his stomach and tried not to come instantly as Tony ran possessive hands over his chest, traced the tendons that stood proud in his neck.  He panted, and held tight, and _didn’t_ shove upward with his hips, no matter how badly he wanted to.  

God, it was good.  It was everything he had ever imagined as a young man thrusting into his own hand, lubed only with spit as he tried to be quiet enough his mother wouldn’t know.  And he could never have imagined—

Well.  There were a lot of things he couldn’t have imagined, not back then.  He’d come a long way.  And he had to admit, as he arched his neck upward and Tony bent down to meet him in a kiss, the future was currently looking pretty great.

Tony rode him in small pulses, more rocking jerks than true up-and-down strokes.  The pace he set was fast, as fast as Steve usually liked it, and the pressure was so unbelievably tight around him.  He looked glorious: glistening, muscles gleaming in the low light, rising up over Steve like the Archangel over a sinner.  Steve could barely even blink, and sure as hell didn’t want to look away.  His breath was catching in his throat at every slide of Tony’s hips, and he was panickingly aware that it going to make him come far too quickly.  Already his sack was starting to tighten, testicles drawing upward.

“Fine,” Tony gasped out when he said so.  “That’s okay—I’m not far, just—oh— _oh—”_ Tony leaned back a little, changing the angle slightly.  Steve felt it, the change inside, and realized he was hitting something within Tony, something which was making this much better for him, something that was making his eyes glisten and leak as breathless curse words pouring from his throat.

Tony was well-muscled and fit, but even so, he couldn’t keep it up forever—and neither could Steve.  Even as Tony was sweating, dripping with it so that a droplet hit Steve’s lip—Steve licked it up automatically, tasting salt—Steve was getting close, too, was starting to _need_ to move, to thrust, to drive in and _take,_ to _own._ He cursed, and cursed again.  Tony echoed him, then added, “Fuck, just—do it, take over—grab my ass, _fuck m—!”_

Steve didn’t even need him to finish the sentence before he was doing it.  And this, _this_ might be where he gave away the superstrength, because Tony’s hips were turning white from the pressure of his grip, and at this angle he probably _shouldn’t_ be able to lift Tony and bring him down like that, again and again, burying himself inside.  But he also couldn’t stop, _couldn’t_ stop, and God, he hoped Tony was close, because _he_ was, _he_ was going to go off like a goddamned _rocket—_

Tony came, shouting loud and triumphant, one hand curled around his own cock, aiming it to spray all over Steve’s marked-up chest, shooting once, twice, _three times,_ messy and appalling and amazing.  The world froze, upended for one perfect moment...

Steve came, burying himself deep and finishing in three short, sharp, probably-too-hard strokes.

 

* * *

 

He blacked out for a couple minutes, afterward.  Not a true blackout, it wasn’t dangerous, but he couldn’t have moved unless Red Skull came through the door shooting, and he wasn’t thinking about anything at all.  

He really hoped Tony was having _at least_ as good an afterglow.  

Steve was slowly starting to think again—mostly things like, “Where are my fingers?  Oh, good, still on my hands”—when Tony stirred.

“Wow.  Go, team—you are _really_ good at that, by the way—”

“Am I?”  Steve genuinely hadn’t considered the possibility that he might be a good lay.

“You definitely are—the command thing?  Super hot.  Not for everyone, I guess, but it works for me—a little growling and hair pulling goes a long way—and whenever I asked you to do something, you _really_ did it, so, yes:  good at it.  A thing you are.  Do you want a mint?”

“Do I need one?”  Had he done all that kissing with bad breath?

“No, I just found a bunch in the drawer when I was going for the condoms, I think they’re leftover from the New Years party.  Did you want one?”

“It’s _August,”_ Steve objected.  He blinked up at the ceiling.  “...Yeah, sure.”

The mint was sweet, and slightly chalky.  Felt pretty good on Steve’s throat, though.  “Don’t suppose you have anything to drink?”

“Huh?  Oh, yeah—there’s a full bar, what’s your preference?  I have vodka, bourbon, scotch, maybe some tequila although I try to pretend it’s a mistake and somebody just left it here—”

“I meant—water?”  

“Oh—!  Sure!” Tony bounced up from the bed, way too much energy filling him considering what they had just been doing.  “I’ll go grab it, and also a robe—although, I’m not sure any of the ones I have fit you—do you want to hang out for a while, just have a drink and go to bed, or what?  What’s your preference?”

Steve blinked some more.  “...Water,” he repeated, saying it slow in the hopes that Tony would get that particular hint.  His stomach rumbled, and he amended, “Water, and maybe a snack?”

Tony opened his mouth again, then seemed to really _look_ at Steve for a second.  He closed it without saying anything and just nodded before popping off, buck naked, to go rummage in his icebox.

Steve elected to forego sitting up and just lie still, trying to figure out how to move and listening to the sounds of Tony’s manic energy.  

It took about ten minutes for Tony to come back in.  He returned with a whole tray of things, and Steve was pretty sure he had heard water running in the bathroom, too.  Tony was a lot calmer when he came back.  The first thing he said when he entered the room with a tray was an apology:  “Sorry.  I get pretty high-energy after—yeah.  I know it’s annoying; sorry you had to put up with that.” Steve opened his mouth to say it wasn’t a problem, but Tony continued before he could get a word out.  “Here; there’s water, and also some orange-pineapple juice—” Juice sounded _amazing._ “—and then I grabbed some pizza rolls, which, spoiler alert, do tend to come out of the microwave kind of soggy—sorry.  Again, sorry, it’ll wear off—”

“It’s fine,” Steve interrupted.  He scooted himself up in the bed and took the tray out of Tony’s hands, going for the juice first because he could see beads of moisture condensing on the glass.  “I don’t mind.  Hey, this is good!”

“Is it?  I mean, good!  And, uh... thanks.  And, wow—you really let _me_ be your first time?”

Steve chuckled as he tried one of the pizza rolls.  They tasted very little like actual Italian pizza, and Tony was right that they were soggy, but they weren’t bad.  “And now you’re bringing me food in bed and offering me your bathrobe, so...  Good decision, I’d say.”

Tony blinked and rounded the bed.  He got in on the other side, and pulled the blankets over his lap.  He crossed his legs tailor-style, and Steve could see his knee bouncing under the sheets.  “So...” Tony looked around the room, gaze jumping from one fixture to the other as Steve worked his way through the little dumplings.  Now both knees were jumping, left then right like a teeter-totter. “...What brought you to DC? If you’re from New York.”

Steve swallowed a pizza roll and shrugged.  “Work,” he answered truthfully. “And—that’s where the Army let me go at.  My family’s all dead, so... no real reason to leave.”

“Jesus!  Your family is _dead?_  You’re a little young for that, what happened?!”

“Time,” Steve said grimly.  “And other things.” He frowned down at the tray.  He couldn’t really chalk any of his real family up to time—not his ma, who died of tuberculosis, and not Bucky, who died—who had died in a fall.  But as a general explanation, _time_ still felt true.  He shook his head and picked up a pizza roll.  “Here.”

Tony couldn’t have looked more surprised if Steve had slapped him in the face with the roll, but he opened his mouth and let Steve feed it to him.  Steve picked up the water and drained about half of it in one go, then passed that over to Tony, too.  Tony looked shy and tentative as he took it—like one of the monkeys in the zoo, reaching out to take fruit from the hand of a stranger, all big eyes and slow movements.  He smiled as he put the fruit in his mouth, though, and Steve couldn’t help smiling back.

“What time do you need me out of here by?”  Steve drank most of the rest of the juice in a few gulps—it really was good—but saved the last couple ounces for Tony.  “I assume that’s why you had me bring the bike, was so I could get home.”

“Ehhh...  I actually had some incredibly pervy plans for that bike, but then I found out—well.  Those plans were more advanced stuff.  I figured I should _not_ do that for your first time, so.  Did this instead.  And—morning’s good.  You can crash here—you have work in the morning?”

“No, I’m... on call.  You’re saying I can sleep here?”  That sounded pretty generous to Steve, but Tony just waved absently.

“Yeah, yeah, no big deal—the bed’s big enough, and while I _am_ an asshole, I’m not _rude._ Okay, that’s a lie, I am frequently rude, but—anyway!  Yes, you can stay, you’re welcome to stay, but also, if my fidgeting is going to bother you, please don’t feel obligated, it’s not a test, you can do whatever you want, emphasis on the _you wanting it_ part.”

Did Tony even _breathe?_

“It’s fine,” Steve repeated.  “I slept in the middle of army camps for years; I’m sure I’ll be able to sleep through your tossing and turning.  But, uh... can I use your toothpaste?” The juice was already making his mouth feel thick and sticky, and he hadn’t packed an overnight bag.

“Hotel toothpaste,” Tony said.  “Help yourself.  Should be toothbrushes, too.”


	4. Chapter 4

Steve dreamed of a small town on what used to be the old Dutch border.  The border was somewhere else, now; the town was German. Or, in German territory, anyway.  The Dutch were resisting the Nazis as fiercely as anyone could, and this town in particular had housed a whole passel of Resistance fighters.  

_ Had  _ housed—not anymore.  Now it was empty, a husk of ash and smoke.

It really _had_ been, too—as in, in real life, not just in Steve’s nightmares.  HYDRA had struck a mere hour before Steve and the Howlies had shown up to warn the villagers.  They had raced most of the way there, but by the time they got within a couple of miles, they had known they were too late.  The cloud of black smoke rising over the treeline had been... distinctive. 

That had been bad enough.

But if that was all Steve and the Howlies had found when they got there, he wouldn’t have been dreaming of it now.  If that was where it had ended... But when they showed up, the HYDRA platoon had still been there, preparing to march out.  

And Jan Bakker had been a particular friend of Steve and his men.  

The slaughter was fast, because Dernier had thrown the first grenade and because when Dernier threw grenades, you didn’t usually need a second one.  The rest of the Howlies had fallen on the Nazis like a cloudburst. The fight had lasted less than a minute, and by the end of it Steve had been soaked in blood.  

That, too, would have been bad enough.

But of course, this was a dream...  So the end of it wasn’t really the  _ end  _ of it.

In the dream, the HYDRA platoon didn’t fall.  Oh, they were defeated—soundly, swiftly, and explosively—but in the dream, they didn’t  _ fall.   _ The sergeant Steve had most-of-the-way decapitated with his shield stayed on his feet, his head hanging off his neck to the side, a sneer on the sideways face, marching forward in a staggering stumble because, after all, it was hard to walk straight when the world had turned sideways.  Beside him, the burned corpse of the man who had been standing over the grenade when it landed was slowly reassembling itself, the arm black and smoking as he groped around for the missing chunk of his leg. 

The air smelled of metal and smoke, underpinned with the putrid sweetness of messy death.  Steve swallowed the saliva that flooded his mouth, fought down the nausea.  _ No.   _

The undying sergeant lurched towards him, his eyes focused on Steve’s face.  “Captain America,” he said, in a voice like Johann Schmidt’s. Around him, the other soldiers started saying the name, too, all their voices blending together as they advanced towards the Howlies.  “Captain America... Captain America... is this what America does?”

One of the Nazis had tried to surrender.  But he had tried it on Dum Dum, and he had done it in German, and even if Dum Dum had spoken German, Steve wasn’t convinced he would have spared the man.  

“Is this how America fights?”  

It was still Schmidt’s voice.  Schmidt still wasn’t there, but it was his voice.  Steve squeezed his eyes shut. 

“No...”  He braced his shield as the sergeant came towards him.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the HYDRA monsters stab Bucky, moving slowly as if through water, his rusted-looking knife sinking into the soft flesh of Bucky’s back.  Bucky’s face turned towards Steve as he fell, betrayal and agony in his eyes—the same as it always was when Bucky fell in Steve’s dreams.

“Is this how America dies?”

_ “No—!”   _

Steve rushed the HYDRA man, bludgeoning him with his shield so hard he flew backward and hit the side of burned-out house.  But there was always another soldier to take his place, and the nearest was a heartshot young man, blond and almost as slim as Steve used to be.  He stumbled towards Steve, his heart pulsing blood out of the hole in his chest so that it poured down the front of his uniform. “It’s not what you see,” he said.  

“It was real,” Steve snarled.  “It was real, I didn’t stop it, and I’m  _ sorry!”   _

“Steve!  It is not what you see!”  The dying man reached out for him and Steve warded away the touch, striking his arms aside with a sweep of the shield.  “It’s August, 2011! What you see is not real!”

“It  _ was  _ real,” Steve insisted.  His breath felt like a sob in his chest.  “I’m so sorry—”

“It’s August 15th, 2011!  You’re in Washington, DC, in the top room of the Four Seasons.  My name is Tony Stark.”

Steve blinked, and suddenly he was sitting upright in an overly large bed.  Tony was standing some six feet in front of him, on his feet beyond the end of the mattress, rubbing his forearms.  The room was dark, lit only by the reflected light of the city coming in the window. If Steve hadn’t had such good night vision, he wouldn’t have been able to see Tony at all.

The air conditioning hummed, but Steve was still covered in sweat.  

“Oh, God...”  Steve covered his eyes with his hands and flopped back down in bed, a jerky, almost violent movement.  The pillow hissed air out as Steve’s head crushed it, and he bounced on the not-quite-firm-enough mattress.  “...did I hurt you?”

He probably had.  Oh, God... Be nice if he could have even one damned thing in his life without ruining it.

Beyond the end of the bed, Tony looked guilty and stopped rubbing at his arms, tucking his hands down out of sight.  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Are  _ you  _ okay?”

“Nightmare,” Steve said shortly.

Tony didn’t say anything to that obvious response.  

Steve swung his legs out of bed, grabbing the jeans he could just barely see on the floor.  He put his legs in to the knee, pulled them past his feet and stood, only realizing as they refused to pass his hips that the jeans weren’t his.  He cursed to himself as he pulled them off again, and then once more as he looked around and didn’t see his pants anywhere: not on the floor, not on the bedside table, where else could they—?

Something rustled, and Steve looked up in time to see Tony picking them up.  He held them in front of his chest, clutching them almost. “It’s fine,” he said.  “Steve, nightmares are... they’re normal. Especially with soldiers, the PTSD—”

“I do  _ not  _ want to hear about the PTSD!”

“Okay!  Okay, okay, okay, I get the hint, fine—and that makes total sense, anyway, no one wants to talk about that stuff, least of all with their recent lay, but listen: you’re doing okay.”

It was so much the opposite of what Steve had expected that he actually did stop hunting his shirt to listen.

“You said you have a therapist, you’re working on it, you do the things—you reach for fruit, basically—and this may be a setback or it may just be everyday life—”  

“Closer to that.”  The nightmares came roughly three times a week, these days.  They had been nightly when he first came out of the ice. 

“—but either way, it’s just a nightmare!  No harm done. And... Look, it’s not a secret that I, too, need therapy—which I don’t get; trust thing, do as I say, not as I do, et cetera—and the part where  _ you  _ actually  _ do  _ the shrink thing, that is... well.  I’m impressed, is all. Good job.”

Tony balled Steve’s jeans up and tossed them to him.  They lost their aerodynamic shape halfway through the pass, but Steve was able to snatch them out of the air, anyway.

He licked his lips and then stared at Tony some more, pants clutched absentmindedly in his fist.  “...I only do the therapy because they threatened to fire me if I didn’t,” he said doubtfully. “Not sure that counts.”

“Eh, pretty sure it does.”  Tony shrugged. “Okay, enough; boring talk, right?  Lecture’s over, go get your water or whatever it was you needed pants for.  I’m going to try to sleep, so if I’m out when you get back don’t take it personally.  I always drop off faster in hotel rooms. Weird, I know—what?”

Steve was still staring at him.  “I... I was putting on clothes so I wouldn’t get arrested.  I assumed... Seemed obvious you would want me to go.” Was Tony seriously saying he would be alright if Steve  _ stayed?  _

“Wait, what?  No, why would you go?  Just go back to sleep, it’ll be fine—do you think  _ I’ve  _ never woken up from nightmares?  Happens to everybody, and seriously, it is  _ not  _ your fault.  Here, come on, look:  I’m getting back in the bed.  Now, you do it.”

Steve wasn’t sure Tony really knew what he was dealing with, here.  It was partially Steve’s fault—no, entirely his fault. He should have thought of this before he tried to spend the night.  His nightmares were vivid, always dark memories of the war, and he often thrashed wildly as they occurred. He might well have injured Tony; he had already ripped apart three or four pillows in his own home.  He could have done real damage, here.

But on the other hand... Steve almost never had nightmares twice in one night.  And Tony seemed sincere in his desire for Steve to stay. 

In the end, Steve decided, they were both grown-ups.  That was one of Dr. Chan’s favorite phrases: “You’re a grown-up, Steven.  No one makes you do anything. You, and not your circumstance, your orders, or your society, are responsible for your behavior.”  And then she would give this tiny little smile, the sort of smile you gave when you found out that one of the cruelest bullies of your childhood, the one who left school in seventh grade and never came back, had actually gotten polio and walked with a permanent limp these days.  The kind of smile that was grim and vicious, and that scurried back into hiding almost as quickly as it saw the sunlight because it wasn’t the sort of thing you should be proud of your face for doing, but God Mikey Phalen had been a prick.

Steve tossed the blanket aside and crawled back into bed.

Once they were in, he and Tony didn’t look at each other.  Steve heard Tony move around, but a side-eye revealed that he was curled on his side, sleeping with his back to Steve, knees drawn up to his chest.  Steve sighed and looked up at the ceiling. 

Somehow, through some  _ miracle,  _ he hadn’t managed to fuck this up tonight.  He remembered being little and shy, and sure, the muscles had probably helped his case, but he was pretty sure he would have messed this up all on his own long before the nightmare stage if he were still just that little guy from Brooklyn.  He had been kind of a prick, too, back in the day. Not Mikey Phalen bad, but angry on the inside, and on the outside most of the time, too. He would’ve spat in Tony’s face, back in the day, just because Tony was happy and Steve never, ever would have been.

Well, he still wasn’t going to be.  But tonight he had come pretty close.  And, as Tony’s soft sleep-breathing attested, he hadn’t completely fucked it up, which meant that he might still be close in the morning, too.

For the first time in seventy years, Steve fell asleep looking forward to waking up in the morning.

 

* * *

 

Steve woke up comfortable, which was a hell of a nice change.  His apartment was always stuffy—something about the building having new, more narrow ventilation shafts, his neighbor had said.  But today he was warm without being sticky, under a sheet that was smoother than any fabric he had ever touched in his life, and there was a body-shaped firmness pressing against his back.

He remembered the previous night, grinning, and his morning half-chub thickened.  As first times went, he suspected he had had one of the best.

He yawned, stretching and rolling over until he was half-propped on one arm, watching Tony.  Tony was on his side, too, his back to Steve, his knees curled up like child’s. His form wasn’t childlike, though:  smaller than Steve, but nicely muscled, neither too big nor too skinny. He had just a hint of a soft belly, a curve to his back, and an almost perfectly round ass.  Steve had a mental flash-memory of watching his own fingers sink into that ass and only barely held back a happy giggle. 

So, a very good morning, then.

As he watched, Tony stirred, hunching first away from Steve, then arching his back towards him so that the tips of his hair brushed Steve’s nose.  Grinning at the ticklish sensation, Steve puffed his lips and blew a stream of cool air down the back of Tony’s neck.

Tony jerked satisfyingly, blurting out a noise of surprise, then rolled in the bed until he was facing Steve.  His eyes travelled down over Steve’s chest; he lifted the blanket away from their torsos and ducked his head under it, just to keep looking.  His gaze lingered in significant places, and by the time it meandered its way back up to Steve’s face, Steve was blushing. Still smiling, though.  It was kind of nice to be ogled, or at least nice to be ogled by someone like Tony.

“Hmm!” Tony said, the tone appreciative.  “You really are shaped like that; I thought it might be a trick of the light, but, no, you’re the same in the daylight.”

Steve ducked his overwarm cheeks into the pillow.  “I wasn’t always,” he muttered.

“No, I bet not—let’s hear it for the Army!  You did say it was the Army, right? ...Good god, you’re not a  _ marine, _ are you?”

“Nah.”  Steve cleared his throat then sat up in bed, stretching his arms over his head.  Tony looked shamelessly, and Steve maybe could admit that he leaned into the stretch just a bit more for him.  “I tried, but they said I was too smart.”

He got a bark of laughter and a grope, which was a very nice reward for a joke that was almost as old as Steve was; Tony’s thumb felt electric against Steve’s nipple.  Steve shuddered and rolled over him, ending up on top with his hips pinning Tony to the bed. 

He hesitated, choosing his words.

“I don’t want to be pushy...” he began.  “If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but... I’d like to do it again?”  Jesus, Mary and Joseph, could he be any more awkward?! He huffed, and went on, “If you’d like to, I mean.  Last night was... it was good.” He gave a happy little laugh, looking down as he remembered, and amended, “Very good.”

Tony smiled crookedly, but his shoulders said  _ no.   _ “It’s not that I’m not  _ interested—” _

Steve nodded resignedly and swung his knee back over, climbing back off of Tony again, then dropped on his back to the bed, holding himself up an inch or two on his elbows because it allowed him to tip his head all the way back.  He closed his eyes, letting the too-fast rhythm of Tony’s voice wash over him.

“—you were right, last night was  _ fantastic,  _ A-plus on both our parts I think—but the spirit is willing, et cetera, et cetera—”

Tony had thrown his pants at him last night; where were they now?  Steve had dropped them on the floor; they must be just next to the bed.

“—and there’s probably a little bit of  _ swelling,  _ which is—not bad!  I don’t want you to think that!  But if I go again now, it  _ might  _ get bad, and I’d really rather avoid that—”

“That’s fine, Tony—”

“—so I could give you a handjob instead?”

Steve blinked his eyes open and turned his head, trying to get a good enough look to figure out if he had heard that right.  

“Or maybe a blowjob,” Tony continued, oblivious, “but I really like using my hands, I think it’s a part of the engineering thing—”

“Actually,” Steve interrupted, “I was hoping that you would do it to me.”

Tony frowned.  “Well, if we do hand-jobs we could do it to each other, which, personally, I think is better—”

“No.  I mean, no, but—like last night.  Fucking—I...” Steve was turning even redder, now, but the words had just lined up and fallen into place in his head and he was absolutely going to get them out for once in his life.  “I wanted to try it with you fucking me.”

Tony’s eyes widened.  “Yes!” he blurted. “Wait.  Uhhh, yes? I don’t know, have you ever done that before?  No, of course not, you’d have said—so wait, where is this coming from?”

Steve shrugged.  “Well...  _ you  _ seemed to like it?  And I figure—if you’re used to getting it, you must know—I mean, not  _ used to  _ getting it, that wasn’t—!  Anyway. I figure you’ll do right by me, is all.  You have so far—the whole way. It’s been... really nice.”  He smiled hopefully over at Tony, who seemed frozen in place.  If it hadn’t been for blinking, Steve wouldn’t have been sure that Tony was moving at all.

Finally, Tony opened his mouth.  He froze in that position, too, just for half a second this time.  He gave his head a shake and blinked a couple times, then said, “No promises.  You might not like it, I might decide I don’t feel like it—I don’t, always; almost never in the morning, actually, it’s a thing—but...”

He rolled toward Steve, tapping Steve’s inner thighs to prompt him to move them.  Steve obligingly pulled his knees up, feet kicking happily in the air, and gave Tony a big, happy grin as Tony settled, kneeling, between them.  

It felt peculiar on his face, aching like the muscles had gone unused for a long time.  And actually, they had—Steve tried to remember the last time he had really smiled like this.  It was at least before Bucky had died.

How strange.  He wouldn’t have thought something as simple as this—as popping his cherry, getting laid, whatever you wanted to call it—would be enough to make him happy again.  And maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was some other cause. But he couldn’t deny feeling, for the first time, as if the grief might eventually ease. If nothing else, he knew Bucky would’ve been proud of him for doing this, though.  The thought... helped.

Steve imagined the dramatics of Bucky’s reaction to hearing about this—all of this—and snorted, only a little bitter.  Yes, Bucky would have had some things to say about this, alright, but pride would’ve definitely been part of it.

Tony rolled his eyes at Steve’s snort and gave him soft sort smile back.  “You are ridiculously cheerful for this hour of the morning,” he informed him.  “This is absolutely intolerable. I will not have this kind of high-energy mania in my bed; it’s like being in bed with a labrador, Jesus—”  

But he was dropping kisses on Steve’s cheek and the corner of his mouth, belying his own words.  

The lube was still sitting out on the nightstand, and as distractions went, that one was just about perfect.  Steve snatched it up and presented it hopefully to Tony.

 

* * *

 

Tony absolutely couldn’t move.  His limbs were leaden in the most delicious way, heavy and soft as he lay sprawled across the handsome young soldier he had had the very,  _ very  _ good luck to pick up the previous day.  Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, Tony hadn’t known they still made them like that!  Steve had been shy but confident, adventurous but inexperienced, abs of granite and an ass that wouldn’t quit—- and then he’d put his feet behind his ears as easy as breathing, and when Tony had slid inside of him he had melted and begged.

Incredible.

They lay boneless in bed for a long time afterward, but eventually, they had to move.  A soft chime from Tony’s phone signalled that he had to get up, shower, and dress for his meeting—at the Pentagon, he explained, so he really couldn’t show up scruffy—and Steve said he had to go clean up in case he got called in to work.

“Where  _ do  _ you work, anyway?” Tony called, holding the razor carefully away from his face as he talked.

“SHIELD,” Steve answered.  He had come to lean in the doorway, watching Tony shave with frank appreciation in his eyes.  He was already dressed, jeans and button-down looking sinfully good on him, although oddly old-fashioned in their cut.  

“And who or what is a SHIELD?”  

Steve’s eyebrows lifted.  

Tony lifted his own even as he swiped carefully to the right of his upper lip.  “Oh, what, am I supposed to have heard of it?”

“SHIELD is an NGO,” Steve answered slowly—a rote sort of answer; this was clearly the party line.  “It gets funding and authorization from a number of governments all over the world, as well as an independent global board and a number of private donors.”

“So what does it do?”  Since that had been a very careful non-answer of that question...

“Security.”  Steve shifted—a tell.  He was uncomfortable with this part.  “It was described to me as a mix of the CIA, FBI, the ‘X-Files,’ and an anti-terrorism unit.  The reason we have the multi-governmental sponsorship is so that we can act quickly, even when a situation crosses an international border.”

Tony blinked, then took another pass at his cheek to stall for time.  “That does seem like the sort of thing the head of Stark Industries should know about,” he admitted.  “I bet Obie would’ve known about them—he does most of the business side, contracts and all that. I mostly do design work.”

Not true, really, but Tony found that a lot of people relaxed if he implied that he wasn’t as active in the business as he really was.  Steve didn’t seem to be one of then, though; he just gave Tony a dry look. 

“SHIELD was founded in the wake of WWII by the same people who ran the SSR,” he said dryly.  “It was established, and primarily funded, by your father, and the Starks are still one of the major donors today.  So, yeah—I thought you would have heard of it.”

Tony’s heart jackrabbited in his chest at the mention of his father, squeezing painfully.  So damn many things his old man had contributed to, and Tony was still tripping over new ones today...  “His judgement was pretty great,” he said. He tried to sound careless about it, but suspected, from the awful look on Steve’s face, that he was missing the mark.  “When he died—there was a list; organizations he supported, gave to, that sort of thing. I just had the lawyers keep it all going. Easier that way, really.”

He must sound awful; the look on Steve’s face was deathly.

“We didn’t—he didn’t tell me things.”  Tony was muttering; that was a mutter. He rinsed the razor in the sink and took another pass.  Rinsed it again. “Not surprising—anyway! Do you like it? Your work, I mean.”

Steve shifted, apparently thinking about the question.  “I like making a difference,” he said finally. “And SHIELD is about the best way I can think of to do that, given—who I am.”

Tony nodded, switching to the small trimmer for his goatee.  “That’s not an answer, but I’m guessing it’s what I get,” he said lightly as he switched it on.  

Steve nodded seriously, as if Tony hadn’t just been teasing him, and stayed where he was, watching Tony finish up his toilette.  

When Tony finally put down the trimmer, Steve shifted.  “I should... go, I guess.”

Well, yes.  But...

Tony didn’t do this.  Or at least, not often.  The hookups, yes—god, yes, and seriously, thank god he lived in the modern age because he would definitely have gotten hanged as a man-whore in the eighteen hundreds.  Although they would probably have called it something else.

But this?  What he was about to do?  No. Especially not to strangers—and these days, everyone who wasn’t family was a stranger.

“You still have my number?”  Tony wasn’t really asking. He had made sure of it already when hacked Steve’s phone while they dozed.  It was surprisingly difficult; these SHIELD people apparently gave their guys decent tech.

“I think so?”  

“Uh-huh—wanna do this again?”

Steve blinked and came out of his easy lean, weight shifting towards the balls of his feet.  Tony hid behind a towel, swiping it up over his face and running it over his still-wet hair before casually reaching for the mousse, extra-casually avoiding Steve’s eyes.  

Steve cleared his throat, even the sound of it awkward.  

“Oh, god,  _ don’t,”  _ Tony said, cutting him off.  “Whatever you’re thinking, that’s not what I—I just want sex.  Again. With you.” He watched in the mirror as Steve paused, one foot raised in the act of stepping towards Tony, a puzzled expression landing on his face.  

“As opposed to...?”

“Dating.  Or emotions.  None of those, please.”  Tony had had some... bad experiences.  Like Ty. And Sunset. And Rumiko. And—Tony didn’t date, anymore.  Ever. Anyone. 

Ever.

“This is—this is as close as I come.  To that. You’re—easy, is all.”

“Excuse me?!”  

“Not that way!”  Maybe a little bit in that way.  “You just... You haven’t  _ asked  _ me for anything.  Hell, you didn’t even know I was  _ me,  _ at first... somehow.  Everyone always  _ wants  _ things from me, real things or sappy things, doesn’t matter, and anyway you... haven’t.  Except for the one thing I was happy to give, which, I think we can both agree, has worked out extremely well for everyone.”  

Steve tipped his head to the side, acknowledging that point.  

“And I have a list...”  Tony picked up his phone, pulling up the relevant file.  “...of people like you. People I can call for a good time, and maybe some good-spirited drinking and bitching about life, without any of it ending up in a tabloid, or having to buy them a porsche, or anything.  It’s good. So: I know I implied this was a one-off, but I’d like to put you on the list.” 

Steve folded his arms and leaned back against the door frame again, a thoughtful look on his face.  His stillness seemed unnatural to Tony, although it should be said that Tony had never been still in his life, so what did he know—but yeah, Steve was ominously quiet.  Tony glanced away, looking down at the phone in his hand, and frowned. “I really should update this list anyway, the first four people on here are no longer no-stress: Kidnapping attempt, industrial espionage, asked me to marry him, tried to poison Pepper....”

“You have terrible taste in no-stress hook-ups,” Steve observed.  Tony grinned, though, because Steve’s voice had held a laugh, and that meant that Tony hadn’t fucked this up yet.  

He was already typing by the time Steve agreed.  

“So.”  Steve stepped all the way into the room at last as Tony finished, closing in on Tony and cupping his face in his hands.  “Is this an okay way to say goodbye, then?”

Tony pushed up on his toes and met Steve’s mouth.  Steve’s good-bye kiss was sweet and spicy, lingering brushes of the lips interspersed with teasing nips.  Tony remembered how awkward Steve had started out the previous night, tentative formality and flaccid lips.  God damn, the man learned  _ impressively  _ fast!  

Tony was breathing fast by the time Steve drew back.

“Glad I’m on the list,” Steve said.  His voice was rough and mischievous. Tony flashed back to the sickly look on Steve’s face the previous night, remembered him saying he hadn’t wanted... anything, really... and again marveled at the change.  It felt good; almost made Tony feel useful, really. 

It was... nice.  It made something ease in Tony’s chest, just a little.  Like standing in the sunlight for once.

“I’ll call you soon,” Tony told him, and then tilted his head to watch that glorious, hot, probably still sex-slick ass walk out his hotel room door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cut about three thousand words of mostly-porn from this chapter. Be sad with me. (It's better without it, though, unfortunately.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major thanks and kudos to my beta News on this. Seriously, I feel like I'm getting better as a writer every time you look at my stuff. BLESS YOU, News!!! Also, just to give readers a heads up, I'm trying to knock out two (2!!!) big bang fics in the next two months, so I will definitely not be updating this fic in that time. It'll probably be around November/December, alas. If it helps, my plan for the opening scene of the next chapter is the long-awaited bike-porn. So, something to look forward to there, at least!
> 
> CW: There is a therapy session in this which does not go well. I realize that's not the usual tagged-for content warning, but I also know how hard it is to actually go to therapy and embrace it and make it work. For the record, Steve is NOT doing that work in this fic! (Personally, I have a hard time headcanoning him as someone who would, anyway. There would have to be special circumstances.) But he also does not have a good therapist. If you feel like reading any of that will be detrimental to your mental health or therapy progress, then don't! It's the first scene, and you can scroll right past it, or skip this chapter all together.
> 
> And now: Fic!!!

Doctor Marie Chan’s office was clean and sterile.  To Steve’s eye, it hardly looked like a doctor’s office—but then, he supposed, that was the point.  It had a couch and two chairs in it, one of which Dr. Chan always sat in; two end tables, each with a lamp and a box of tissues; and a low coffee table with a glass surface.  The coffee table always held: one sand-garden complete with tiny rakes, three books stacked on top of each other so that all you could read of them was their spines, and one potted plant.  The plant did not have flowers.

There was also a massive desk in the room, overpoweringly large.  Steve was pretty sure if Dr. Chan got tired she could lay out on it and take a nap without even having her feet fall off the end.  The desk had a gray blotter on top of it, a mug with pens and pencils in it, an inbox (always empty), an outbox (usually also empty), and a row of composition notebooks filed one next to the other, pushed against the back wall and held up by bookends.  Each of the notebooks was for a patient, Steve guessed, because she always pulled one out of the stack for him at the start of the session. She never had to guess which one it was.

Dr. Chan call-me-Marie was herself a tiny woman, as undersized as the desk was over-.  She had a decisive little point of a chin and her skin seemed to cling uncomfortably close to her high cheekbones, as if she were so self-controlled that not even her cheeks wanted to relax.  Her hair was chin-length and straight with an asymmetrical part. She sometimes wore glasses, but sometimes did not; it wasn’t contacts, though. Steve thought maybe he—or, people in general, he guessed—were supposed to _think_ she wore contacts, but he could see that the glasses had no prescription, and he knew how to spot contacts.  She didn’t wear any.

She was sitting at her desk now, tapping one of her pens against the composition book with all the precision and warmth of a metronome.  Her legs were crossed at the knee. So were Steve’s. He had started mimicking her postures two months ago, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed yet.  

_Tap.  Tap. Tap._

Dr. Chan had asked him twenty-seven taps ago if there was anything he particularly wanted to discuss today.  Twenty-three taps ago, he had simply said, “No,” and then fallen silent again. Steve had figured out early that these sessions were going to be excruciating; now, if he had a card to play, he always made her drag it from his hand.  It helped the time pass.

_Tap.  Tap. Tap._

That was thirty; now she would—

“Did you do anything interesting this week?”

"Interesting to who?"

Dr. Chan was almost certainly trying to make his head explode with her mind, but her face was a smooth mask.  “You’re the patient, Steven. The question is whether _you_ found your week interesting.”

Sometimes—like when she used that tone—Steve was pretty sure that Dr. Chan hated him as much as he hated her.  

No, that wasn’t fair—he didn’t hate _her._ He hated being required to come to her, hated the implications of having to see a psychologist, hated that she wrote everything down, hated that SHIELD wouldn’t let him into the field if he didn’t go through this stupid, _stupid_ routine.  He didn’t hate _her,_ though.  Not really.

Okay, maybe a little bit.

 _Tap.  Tap. Tap._ She kept tapping her pen against the book.  

It was a trap, her question.  If he said he didn’t think anything was interesting, then he was _exhibiting anhedonia_ and _dangerously depressed._ Possibly it would even _warrant monitoring and possible committal._ But if he said it _was_ interesting, he would have to tell her something that could possibly count.

Well, time to get the shit show started.

“I guess I did, then.”

He folded his hands together in his lap and waited.  

Dr. Chan blinked, twice, her lips pressing together a smidgeon, and then started tapping again.  

Point to Steve.

“What did you do that was interesting, Steven?”

He really hated that she called him that.  He had asked her to call him Steve, but she had refused.  That was when the whole “Dr. Chan” thing had started.

“I met someone.”

Dr. Chan raised her eyebrows in surprise, her lips pursing.  The pen actually hovered in the air, she was so surprised. “Romantically?”

Tony had been very clear that they were not dating.  “No.”

“Oh,” she said.  The pen started tapping again, twice, then stilled once more.  “So you made a friend.”

Steve thought about it.   _Were_ they friends?  They hardly knew each other well.  But on the other hand, they weren’t exactly strangers at this point, and Tony had said they could do it again sometime.  If they were going to be repeatedly in each other’s company, and they weren’t dating, then... “I guess so,” he said. Strange to think of it that way, though.  “Would you look at that?”

“That’s great,” Dr. Chan said.  “How’d you meet.”

Steve suppressed a scowl at her tone, which sounded like she kind of knew it should be a question, but she wasn’t really asking.  More that she knew that if she said the words even vaguely in the form of a question, basic politeness would compel him to answer her.  She used that tone for a lot of things Steve didn’t really want to answer.

“I was admiring his car,” Steve lied.  

_Tap.  Tap. Tap._

“And then what?”

_Tap.  Tap._

“He gave me his number.”

No tap.  “He gave you his _number?”_  Dr. Chan had raised her eyebrows and her voice.  

“Yes?  I mean...  for messages.”

“Do you think he recognized you?”

Steve paused.

He really didn’t think Tony had recognized him.  He was pretty sure that would have been more dramatic.  Tony didn’t seem the sort to fawn, but he _did_ seem the sort to start pushing once he realized that Steve had a similar level of renown to Tony’s own.  A sort of struggle-for-dominance, whose-is-bigger situation. So the fact that being with Tony was as _easy_ as it had been...  That alone argued that Steve’s secret identity was still, well... secret.  

In fact, Steve hadn’t been worried about that at _all_ until just this second.  So the fact that Dr. Chan thought of it first, and asked so promptly when everything else she had said was very deliberate...

This time, Steve didn’t try to hide the frown.  

“I don’t think so, no.”  He studied Dr. Chan with the same scrutiny she usually turned on him.  “Do you think that’s all I would have to offer? That that’s the only interesting thing about me?”

Dr. Chan blinked.  “Of course not,” she said. “But you’ve said before that keeping your identity secret is a burden for you.  I thought you might want to talk about that.”

No, he hadn’t.  Had he? He didn’t remember saying anything like that...  

Confused, he didn’t reply, letting the room lapse into silence again.  He looked away and crossed his arms, frowning. The room was silent for a second, even Dr. Chan’s pen staying still.  

Steve knew, and couldn’t forget, that everything he said in these sessions would eventually make its way to Fury.  He was sure that was why Dr. Chan had asked about him being discovered: because Fury was going to ask _her._ But also, Steve realized, he was kind of a boring guy, outside of work.  It was possible she really _did_ think that was the only interesting thing about him.  And that...

Well, it didn’t matter.  It wasn’t like Steve was leaping to open up to her, anyway.

Dr. Chan broke first.  When she spoke, there was a hint of an apology in her voice.  Not the same as an _actual_ apology, and not out-and-out admitting the awful truth of these sessions, but still better than nothing.  “What did you and your new friend talk about?”

Steve considered making her draw this out of him, too.  Considered drawing out the session to its ugliest final scene.  Considered what she would write on her little composition book if he did.  

He sighed. “We talked about me being from Brooklyn, a little bit.  Talked about what he does, and what I do—not explicitly, don’t worry, he just knows I work for SHIELD.  Talked a lot about me being recently back from war; he’s got a buddy who serves, says they’ve talked about that a lot.”

Steve tried to resist it, he really did.  He didn’t _like_ Dr. Chan, but that was no reason to be crass, no reason to be rude.  But then the devil took over his tongue, and before he could stop himself he had added, “And the sex was pretty interesting, too.”

Dr. Chan’s jaw drop was _absolutely worth it._

 

 

* * *

 

 

She grilled him for the rest of their hour, of course, but in the end even she had to admit that he had been doing a good thing for himself by taking up what had been offered.  She asked for particulars of his paramour, which he declined to provide—“I know SHIELD is going to figure it out anyway, but it still seems like betraying a confidence.”—and made arrangements to see him again at their regular bi-monthly appointment time.  

Steve was more than happy to take that as the victory it was.

 

* * *

 

Steve had exactly one conversation with Tony in the following weeks.  It was a phone call which lasted less than three minutes, initiated on Tony’s end, about—of all things—car colors.

“Hey, Man of Mystery—quick question.  You’re looking at a car, it’s a nice car, perfect for your needs—and when I say perfect, I mean _perfect:_ it has shit you didn’t even know you wanted in it, it has the turbo boost, it has five million cupholders, it has it all—but it’s purple.  Like, _Barney_ purple.  Do you keep looking, or do you buy it anyway?”

Steve frowned and played dumb.  “Why would I buy a car? DC has a highly regarded public transportation system. Nothing on New York, but perfectly adequate—”

“Oh, my god—you are _not_ taking the train to work!  No, please tell me that is not what’s happening—”

“Usually I just walk; I live close,” Steve said earnestly.  He smiled up at the sky. It was a beautiful sunny day outside, puffy little clouds like hyperactive sheep hopping across the blue.  A brisk wind brought scents of flowers from the bush on the corner. In fact, Steve really was walking as he spoke, but it wasn’t his usual mode of transport.  If SHIELD really wanted him to come in, they usually sent a QuinJet. But since he wasn’t sure Tony was cleared to know about the QuinJets—and since it was _enormously_ fun to yank Tony’s chain—pretending he walked to work all the time it was.

“I’m dead,” Tony told him.  “I’m dying, I’m dead, you are not real and I hate you—call you later this week for a hookup?  I’m busy until Friday, but Friday night I’ll either be free or murdering someone, might be able to make it work.”

Steve wondered if he was going to lose his breath _every_ time Tony casually proposed sex over the phone.  “Friday is fine,” he said when he had recovered himself, “unless I get called in to work.  Don’t murder anyone, it’s rude.”

“Oh, well.  If it’s _rude,_ then of course not.”  There was a smile in Tony’s voice and then a click as he hung up the phone—without saying goodbye, but then, Steve found he rather liked that.  Easier, somehow.

When Dr. Chan asked at their next session—which she did immediately, despite Steve having had a mission in between that she should definitely have asked about first—Steve was able to tell her that they had plans for Friday night.  It was enormously satisfying.

 

* * *

 

Happy let him in with a fistbump and a smile.  Steve nodded gravely to him and then moved in, following the sound of Tony’s voice as Tony ranted to someone Steve couldn’t see.

When he came around the corner, he saw Tony back on the couch, a cordless headset in his ear.  Steve raised his eyes and shucked himself out of his motorcycle jacket. It was made of slick leather, heavy and hot as hell in the swelter of the DC summer once your were off the bike—but if he drove back in the morning, he knew, it would be cooler, and it was worth sweating now to avoid freezing then.  He tossed the jacket over the end table and rubbed his hand through the hair on the back of his head, wet from sweat under the collar, and took stock as Happy slipped out of the suite, closing the door behind him.

“I don’t care,” Tony was saying into his headset.  He met Steve’s eye and nodded a greeting, then rolled his eyes and went back to his phone call. “I don’t _care,_ Pepper!  Look, I know it’s old-fashioned, I know it’s not as profitable as all the fancy shit we do, but that department is one of the few in the company still around that was started by my father, and the fact is, it’s not exactly running at a loss!  That department makes up three percent of our _profits—_ not even sales, _profits,_ and I—yeah, I know, and _they_ didn’t listen to me either!”  

Tony looked over at Steve with a grumpy look on his face, a “can you believe I have to deal with this?” sort of expression.  He rolled his eyes and gestured at the phone and headset before shaking his head—he flipped a hand through the air as if throwing the whole mess he was dealing with away—and really _looking_ at Steve, instead.  His eyes travelled down and then slowly back up Steve’s frame.  Steve smirked. Tony smirked back at him.

The woman on the phone stopped talking and Tony started again.  “I’m not getting rid of it, Pepper. I’m _not._ I don’t care if I have to pull rank—”  

The woman said something Steve couldn’t make out, her tone tart.  Tony rolled his eyes.

“Of course they hate it, they’re a bunch of small-dicked octogenarian politicians, they _hate_ finding out that mine is bigger _—hey!”_

Steve had knelt and started working on Tony’s fly.  

Tony sank a hand into Steve’s hair and tugged his head back, looking a question at him.  Steve smiled angelically—not really—and tugged again at Tony’s trousers.

They were nice trousers.  Tony was wearing a suit, or most of one; the jacket was nowhere to be seen.  The tie was hanging loose around his neck, the knot a spot of blue in the center of his chest.  It looked like he had come straight home from his business meeting, collapsed on the couch, picked up the phone and started arguing with people.  In fact, Steve wouldn’t be surprised if that was _exactly_ what he had done.  

Time for a distraction, then.

Tony snorted and tugged again at Steve’s hair, going back to his phone call.  Steve interpreted that as permission and kept moving, tugging the pants open and loose around Tony’s hips.  “No one wants that, but I will if I have to! I just... I know... _I know,_ Pepper!  That’s why I’m _telling you—Holy Jesus FUCK!”_

Steve had swallowed Tony down.

Tony took a shaky breath and rested his hand on Steve’s head.  “Okay,” he said to Steve, and then into the phone, “We’re keeping the department— _we are,_ Pepper.  But— _but—_ your point about the blowback is good.  I will try to find numbers to support it, but if I have to use brute force, I will, so just... be prepared.  For fallout.”

Tony took a deep breath and let it out, shifting down further in the couch, pressing his cock into the back of Steve’s mouth.  Steve loosened his jaw and swallowed as well as he could, pressing the head back against the opening to his throat.

“Yeah,” Tony sighed.  “Yeah. Good. Thanks, Pepper.”  He paused, ruffling Steve’s hair.  

Steve looked up with a mouthful of cock and smiled with his eyes.  Tony’s breath went out of him in a rush, but he pulled it together long enough to end the call:  “That will be all, Miss Potts.” Then he hung up the phone and ripped the piece out of his ear, throwing the whole apparatus towards the other end of the couch.  He breathed two deep, gasping breaths before hauling Steve off by his hair.

Steve let his cock fall from his lips with a pop.

“Is that as far down as you can take me?” Tony demanded.  No “hello,” no flirty commentary, just straight to it.

Steve felt warmed by it, honestly; obliquely flattered.  He wasn’t practiced at this, wasn’t smooth, and it was good to know—or at least, to be treated like—he was doing well.  He grinned, unobtrusively flexing his hands and feet. “So far; want to help me learn to go further?” He smiled wider. “I have _excellent_ lung capacity.”  

This was going to be _good._

Tony grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him in, kissing him hard, all teeth and frustration.  He pulled back with a nip to Steve’s lower lip. “You shouldn’t have taken me without a condom,” he muttered.

Steve shrugged.  After his meeting with Dr. Chan a couple weeks ago, someone from SHIELD’s Health Services had _just coincidentally_ remembered that no one had ever given Steve a briefing on modern STDs.  Nurse McCall had been a dead-eyed sort of woman in her fifties with large curls dyed vaguely purple and old-fashioned glasses.  She was not even a little bit impressed with Steve’s name or history. She had marched into Steve’s office right after he had gotten out of a meeting, sat him down, and given him the facts on all the modern ways to get an itching disease.  Steve, properly mortified, had nodded and flat-out refused to ask any questions after.

Steve hadn’t gotten sick with so much as a cold since 1943, so what did he care about STDs?  But he couldn’t exactly tell Tony that. “I guess if I catch anything, I’ll know who to blame,” he said instead.

Tony looked startled.  “You haven’t been with anyone else since last time?”

“Haven’t wanted to.”  Steve shrugged, uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.  “Too much effort.” Tony’s face shifted, and Steve knew he was remembering their conversation from the first time.   _Wishing you had an apple is a lot easier than reaching out and picking one,_ he had said.  Yeah. Ever since the ice, Steve’s arms had felt so heavy.

He was working on it.  It was better, now, at least.  Since meeting Tony. Knowing this week that he had this to look forward to...  It had made everything lighter, easier. Some of his burdens had felt less heavy.  Steve had always gone for a run in the morning, but twice this week he had noticed the beautiful weather.  That had to be some kind of sign, right?

The tension eased out of Tony’s shoulders again, gone as quickly as it had come, and Steve was surprised to notice himself relax a little in response.  Like there was some part of him that had been worried about losing the mood, and was now reassured. “Oh,” Tony said. He stroked Steve’s shirt with the thumb of the hand he had kept curled into the soft fabric.  “Right, okay. So I’m still the only one, huh?”

Steve shrugged again.  “I can send you a copy of my test results, if you want.”

“Yes, please; that would be—it’s a thing, sorry.  But in the meantime, since you’ve already gone ahead and done it tonight...”

Steve smirked, something low and warm uncoiling in his gut.  “Horses already left the barn?”

“I’m just saying, I would really like to fuck your throat.  I know it’s asking a lot, but can we do that? I’ll guide you through it, I won’t hurt you, I promise, but I have had a _very_ bad day, and that would make up for a lot.”

“Sure,” Steve said.  His pulse kicked up and his mouth watered.  He wasn’t sure why Tony was talking like this would be different from what Steve _had_ been doing for him, but he was looking forward to finding out.  It wouldn’t be bad, whatever it was. He hadn’t known Tony long, but he already knew that.  “Should I stay on my knees like this?”

“Mmm, no.  Follow me.”

Steve would have anyway, but he didn’t exactly get a choice:  Tony curled his hand into Steve’s shirt again and dragged him off, hauling him to his feet before shoving him in the direction of the bedroom.

 

* * *

 

Steve, it turned out, _loved_ having his throat fucked.  Tony put him on his back on the bed, head tipped over the edge to give him a nice straight line to the throat, then kneeled over him and slowly, patiently, worked his cock into Steve mouth, over and over again, until Steve’s jaw was open and relaxed and Tony could just pound into him.  

Steve hadn’t been sure, when Tony asked, what would be involved here.  What was the distinction between _oral sex_ and _throatfucking,_ anyway? The answer was _agency,_ it turned out; when he said he was going to fuck Steve’s throat, Tony meant it.  Tony was in charge, was doing all the moving, and Steve’s job was to stay still, and open, and take it.  

And Steve _loved it._ He felt _useful,_ like this, and easy, almost like he could float away if it weren’t for the anchor of the cock in his mouth.  It wasn’t a forever thing—he wasn’t going to want to just lie here for all of their encounters, that wasn’t in him—but then, Tony hadn’t asked for that, either.  No, this was just an episode—but as episodes went, it was a great one. He groaned and tipped his head back just a little more, pressing his hips and shoulders into the mattress beneath him as his cock rose aching towards his stomach.

Once he had Steve relaxed, Tony got rough with it, although it was nothing Steve couldn’t take.  He thrust sharply from his hips, driving deep and blocking Steve’s air, again and again and again, speeding up and getting rougher whenever he heard Steve choke.  He didn’t make the mistake of putting his hand on Steve’s throat, though. He must have noticed last time that Steve didn’t like it.

He pulled out as he came, spilling first into Steve’s mouth and then over his face.  Steve closed his eyes and kept his mouth open, and soon Tony cleaned him off, touching him carefully, almost tenderly, with a warm, soft washrag.

After that, Tony introduced Steve to intercrural sex, and Steve liked that a lot, too.  It was faster than penetration had been—no need to work anybody open, this way—and easier.  Steve could go as hard as he wanted without worrying about hurting Tony, and he did, covering Tony with his body from knees to throat, pounding into the tight, slick space between his thighs.  Steve’s cock was large enough to that he was nudging Tony’s balls on the downstroke. Tony’s breath caught every time it happened.

Steve closed his eyes and went for it, counting up the gasps and whimpers as he did so and banking them in his mind, storing them up to take out again on some future, darker day, some time down the road when he needed to remember that this had happened.

He spent the night, and Tony woke him in the morning with a generously messy blowjob and hot, catered pancakes.  

“It’s not the kind of friendship I’ve ever had before,” Steve observed over his coffee, “but it’s a good one.”  

Tony smiled, cutting off a surprisingly dainty bite.  “Pretty sure most friendships involve less sex.”

“No, it’s allowed these days!”  Steve grinned and settled more comfortably in his chair.  “There’s even a name for it, and everything: ‘friends with benefits,’ it’s called.”

“We’re a little heavier on the benefits side,” Tony said dryly.

Steve pretended to think about it and smirked.  “They are some _very_ good benefits,” he admitted.  “Pass the bacon?”

The bacon was piled onto a platter, an entire slab’s-worth sliced up and fried to crispy, juicy perfection.  Steve wondered what would happen to it if they didn’t eat it all. Thrown away, probably; this century was so wasteful of everything.  Why had they cooked so much? Why not reuse it if it wasn’t eaten? Steve remembered all the times in his life that he would have crawled through seven inches of mud for so much as a single slice of this stuff, and in some cases actually had...

He shook his head, throwing off the disorientation of abundance which still sometimes took him.  “What’s the division at your company that they’re trying to get rid of?” he asked politely.

Tony froze.  “Who told you about that?”

Steve blinked.  “...You did? You were on the phone when I came in last night.  Sounded frustrated.”

“Oh.”  Tony didn’t move at all for two seconds, then flapped his hand wildly through the air and went back to eating his breakfast, serving himself fresh fruit as if none of it had happened.  “It’s one of the weapons divisions. Can’t talk about it.”

“Ah.”  Steve nibbled his bacon and tried to think of another potential topic of conversation.  His motorcycle, maybe? Tony had seemed at least vaguely interested in that, maybe it would hold his interest for the rest of the meal...

“It’s just—”  Tony set his cup down a little too forcefully, making a solid clank against the table, and making Steve blink.  “Let me ask you this: You’re ex-military, right? What do you think of when you hear the name Stark Industries?”

Was this a trick question?  “Weapons,” Steve shrugged.

“More specifically.”

“What?  Oh.” Steve’s first answer was _my shield,_ but he couldn’t exactly say that.  Luckily, there was another answer right behind it.  He sat back from his plate and gestured, shaping it with his hands.  “You make a handgun, semiautomatic, nine millimeter... I’ve got the extra-large grip mod on the stock, and it’s a longer muzzle than most, gives you a more accurate aim?”

“I know it.  So that’s what you think of, that gun specifically?”

“Yeah!  It’s a great gun.  I fell in love the first time I fired the thing; the accuracy alone...!  It instantly spoiled me. And the accuracy over distance on it is _incredible._  I have to do some adjustments with other guns but with yours...”  Steve mimed with his thumb and forefinger. “...aim and shoot. The craftsmanship...  a lot of guns, these days, they get a little sloppy. That Hammer crap... Jams like it’s got thirteen bushels of peaches about to rot.”  Steve shook his head. “Stark is better.”

“Than _Hammer?_ I would fucking _hope_ so!”

Steve laughed, relaxing into the chair, picking up his fork to start in on his hotcakes.  Tony had passed him the syrup, casual, unthinking. Steve hadn’t known how to tell him that he had never had real maple syrup before—it had always been too expensive when he was younger, and everywhere he had eaten recently had used “breakfast syrup” instead—so he had just poured some on and passed it back.  It was pretty good, it turned out; there was a dark depth to the taste that perfectly balanced the sweetness. Steve chewed and swallowed and reached for the bottle again.

“Hammer is standard at SHIELD,” he said, breaking that bad news as he poured.  “They have a supply contract with us—well, had, anyway. They opted out of renewing at the last second, drove Nick nuts.”

“Nick?”

“Nick Fury—he’s the director of SHIELD.  I figure that’s probably not his real name, but don’t tell him I’ve figured that out.”  Steve smiled, and was rewarded with a gentle chuckle from Tony. Then he put his fork down.  “I’ve actually been wishing I could ask you... Why _doesn’t_ Stark Industries ever bid on SHIELD contracts?  I mean—” He caught himself, shook his head. “If you can’t tell me, you can’t.  I’m not trying to pry out your secrets, here. But it makes no sense.”

Tony had gone still.  “Are you sure of that?”  His voice betrayed nothing but idle curiosity, but it was the first time Steve had ever seen him completely motionless, and Steve had seen him _asleep._ “We _never_ bid on SHIELD?”

“Not once.”  Steve had asked, had gone nosing around to the supplier officers—they weren’t called that anymore, but it was what they were—when he realized how big the disconnect was between what they were using and what they could have.  “And Marty and Finn—that’s the guys in charge of weapons at SHIELD—they have no idea why not, so I figure it must be on your end.”

Tony stayed perfectly still for one more moment, then blinked and smiled smoothly, a mask obviously dropping into place.  “Must be,” he said flippantly, and offered Steve the bacon again.

Steve took it.  There were limits, here; not just the things Tony wouldn’t tell him about his business, but also emotional boundaries.  They would both rather stonewall than be vulnerable around each other, Tony even more so than Steve, somehow. Steve was grateful for that, although his younger self would have been appalled at the cowardice of it: young Steve had had an all-or-nothing attitude which, well, hadn’t really gone away all that much.  

In _this,_ though...  In this, Steve was walking wounded.  His heart was still healing from all the damage that had been done by losing Peggy, and before her, Bucky.  Hell, from losing _everything!_ He wasn’t ready for more than he was being allowed, here.  Not yet. He had to learn the shape of the rules before he could shatter them all.  

And it wasn’t like the shattering wasn’t _coming._ He had never stayed still and quiet before in his life, he could already tell it wasn’t going to happen now.  He thought he could probably develop feelings for Tony, probably pretty big ones if he let it go long enough. But he had to heal first.  

He needed time to adjust, to recover and get his fire back.  It had been all but quenched by the ice.

“If it’s okay,” he said, “I’d love some more of those fresh cherries, too.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got a leeeettle self-indulgent with this one.
> 
> Most of this fic is dedicated to Sabrecmc, who has been an awesome mom to the Stony fandom for ages; this one, though, goes out to Festiveferret. Bless you for your support and patience as you wait for your bike porn! At long last, the day has come! ~~Much like Steve and Tony.~~ Newsbypostcard, you continue to be an absolute *blessing* of a beta. I  <3 you!!!

The next time Steve got an invitation to visit Tony, it had a new address on it:  not the hotel, but instead what turned out to be a large, stone monstrosity in Arlington, surrounded by acres and acres of manicured lawn, all enclosed by a spiked, wrought-iron fence.  When he pulled up outside the gates, he had to get paged in on the intercom by the calm-voiced British man he had previously heard speaking once or twice on Tony’s phone. 

Happy greeted him in the entryway, waving him inside and chattering about baseball as he led Steve back through the mansion.  Steve still followed baseball, in spite of the changes through the years; the radio was a soothing familiarity, for all it came from his phone instead of a larger, freestanding device like he was used to.  The games were good to listen to as he worked out, or in the evenings sometimes when there were too many hours before bedtime. 

Steve was able to hold up his end of the conversation as he followed Happy past bedrooms, bathrooms, living and dining rooms, through the kitchen and out the back, emerging in a garage larger than Steve’s whole apartment put together.  There were three cars in the damn thing and it  _ still  _ wasn’t at capacity.  

The handsome convertible that had first caught Steve’s eye was parked in the closest spot; beside it was a sleek-looking sedan with tinted windows.  Behind that was an oversized SUV, black and dark-windowed like the sedan, so enormous that Steve hadn’t a clue what, if anything, was beyond it. He made his way down the small set of stairs to the concrete floor and started walking, looking around curiously.  

There was something odd about the garage, and it took Steve half the distance to the opposite wall to figure out what it was:  there were no oil spots on the floor. No dust, either, nor dried leaves blown in from the tall trees planted backyard. The trees were spaced at distances carefully calculated to seem random, but for all that Steve could tell that their placement was deliberate.  They were all too young, younger than the house was—and yet, somehow, older than this garage.

Why had Tony taken out this big mansion?  Steve had been studying the architectural styles of the last seventy years; it was one of the first things he had gotten curious about, a melding of  _ artistically influenced  _ and  _ tactically relevant  _ that bumped the field to the top of his list.  This house was maybe sixty years old—solidly mid-century—and the garage, per the pristine condition of it, was new, brand new.  Why had Tony added it on? What did it mean? 

He came around the edge of the SUV—a Cadillac, apparently—and stopped.  

Tony was on his toes at a counter—what would have been a workbench if it were shorter.  The damn thing ran the whole length of the back wall, though, an enormous spread of space.  The wall behind it was covered in tools, all organized and labelled; the wall to Steve’s left, the one shared with the house, was similarly covered in bookshelves stacked with gadget after gadget.  

The floor here dropped another foot and a half, with two simple steps leading down into a pit surrounded by lifts on both sides: a workstation for automobile repair.  Tony was stretching to get something off the top hook on the far wall, fingers just brushing it but not quite getting a grip. Steve could hear him cursing under his breath.  

Feeling dreamlike, possessed, Steve started walking forward, his soft leather boots making little sound on the concrete flooring.  Tony’s feet were close together to give him more reach, his legs pressing against each other as he strained. His ass was pert and round, presented picture-perfect like a pin-up.  

Steve’s mouth watered.

He stepped in closer, behind and slightly to the side of Tony.  He let one hand rest on Tony’s lower back, let their sides brush together all down the length of them.  He reached over Tony’s head, his arm... his whole body. Slowly, he retrieved the tool—some kind of wrench that he set down on the workbench in front of them.  

Both of them immediately ignored it.  

“Thanks for coming, " Tony said.  His voice was pleasant, but a little shaky.  

Steve smiled in answer, letting everything he was feeling—the arousal, the anticipation—leak into it.  “My pleasure.” 

“You bring your bike?”  Tony hadn’t looked away from his eyes.  The two of them were close enough that their breaths were mingling together as they spoke.  Tony smelled, very faintly, of cologne: just enough to know it was there, not enough to be intrusive.  

Steve let his smile quirk sideways.  “You’re umpteen miles into Virginia, Tony—I sure the hell didn’t  _ walk.” _

Tony swallowed, his eyes dropping to Steve’s mouth before snapping back up to his face again.  “Toss the keys to Happy and he can bring it around,” he instructed, brisk tone belied by his breathlessness.  It brought Steve just a little too much satisfaction. “In the meantime, I’ll take you on the tour.”

Tony slid past him, his arm sneaking around Steve’s side in something that wasn’t quite a caress, pressing up against him with full length of his body and breathing hot against Steve’s neck before slipping away, moving back towards the house.  

Steve silently tossed the keys to Happy, who fled out the open garage door with grateful nod and a desperate expression.  

 

* * *

 

Tony did in fact give him a tour.  The mansion was apparently bought off of a disgraced politician, and had plenty of security features leftover from the secret service that Tony was happy to take advantage of.  It also had about fifty-seven bedrooms, it seemed like, although Tony laughed when he said it and corrected him. “It’s only  _ twelve.” _

“Oh,  _ twelve. _  My  _ mistake, _ then.”

Tony had mostly left the bones of the house alone, he said—“It’s a nice place.  Less open than I would like, but you can’t have everything, and this  _ is  _ the east coast.” —but had completely redecorated, and had torn out and replaced everything about the garage.  “New wiring, new floor, new foundation, even. It’s insulated, now, and has its own exhaust and ventilation system, plus heat and an AC unit, and its own generator.”

“Why?” Steve asked as they paused in the kitchen.  Tony peeled off and reached into the icebox to grab what seemed like a random collection of vegetables and milk.  

“Workshop,” Tony explained shortly.  “Ordinary garage, it’s built for storage, mostly— _ maybe  _ some heavier vehicles, if it’s a big one—but I wanted to be able to use the hydraulic lifts, welders, whatever.  I don’t like having limits in my workspaces, it’s a thing.” He loaded the vegetables into a blender, topping it with the milk as he spoke, and hit the button as soon as he was done.  Steve waited for the angry whirr of it to recede, shaking his head when Tony offered him a glass of the resulting liquid. Steve reached for the carrots still sitting out and bit into one of those, instead, munching on it like he was Clark Gable.  

“I didn’t just mean why the  _ garage, _ Tony.  I meant  _ this— _ this whole house.  Why did you buy  _ this?   _ Why not stick with the hotel, like you were before?”  He smiled and gestured with his carrot. “They had free toothbrushes, after all.”

Tony blinked and looked away, sipping at the green goop in his cup.  “Closer ties to the area,” he muttered. “Increased number of contracts with local agencies, strategically sound investment...”  The kitchen had a picture window in the back, and through it Steve could watch Happy puffing as he wheeled the bike around the steep curve of the driveway.  It was fall by now, but a nice day for it: the September sun shone thick and yellow, painting the white slabs of concrete and the green grass with warm tints.  The air was just warm enough that Steve was glad of his jacket; Happy, less sensitive to the chill, was clearly regretting his. 

Steve let his eyes drift away from the window and back to Tony’s face, where he found an expression of vulnerability.  Uncertainty and hope, mingled together. Steve felt the smile stretching his lips before he even understood what that meant.  “‘Closer ties to the area,’ hmm?” He kicked Tony softly in the shin. “Is  _ that  _ what we’re calling this?”

Tony blushed.  It wasn’t much—wasn’t much at all; before the Serum, Steve might not have been able to even see it—but it was there, a faint tinge of pink spreading charmingly over his cheeks.  “It made sense,” he insisted. “SI has a whole mess of contracts with SHIELD, now—”

Steve knew that part already.  Fury had mentioned they were getting new arms suppliers if he wanted to trade in his service weapon, and Reggie Finn, who back in Steve’s day would have been called a quartermaster, had stopped by his office two weeks ago with a fifth of Glenlivet, damn near crying in gratitude.  

“—and I need to be on-hand to maintain those business ties often enough that it just becomes more  _ efficient—” _

_ “Tony.”   _ Steve wasn’t buying it for a minute.  He laughed, shook his head. “Did you really buy a twenty-thousand foot mansion just so you could have more rooms for us to fuck in?!”

Tony was silent for another second of hopeful uncertainty—or was that uncertain hope?  “Do you mind it?” he asked. 

And he really  _ was  _ asking, Steve realized, belatedly remembering the gap between them, the distance that billions of dollars of inherited wealth might inject into one’s relationships.  It dawned on him that the reason Tony was really asking was because at some point in the past,  _ somebody else  _ really  _ had  _ minded.

Steve shook his head.  “Of course not, Tony. It’s... nice.  And even if I did, it’s your money. You can do what you want with it.  I just think...” He trailed off, frowning, only belatedly realizing that he didn’t know  _ what  _ he thought.  There was something...

Ah.  That was it.  

“Growing up, you know...”  He waved the carrot stump widely.  Now it was his turn not to be able to meet Tony’s eyes.  “...I didn’t have anything like this. And I don’t just mean the size of this place, although—God knows, I sure the hell didn’t have that, neither.  I mean  _ all  _ of this.  We were poor, we didn’t have a dishwasher, or a—a blender.”  

He had to be careful how he said this.  It would be easy to mislead Tony, and to a slight extent he would have to:  he couldn’t mention being born in 1918 to somebody who didn’t know he was Captain America.  But the things he was talking about weren’t really related to that. He remembered one winter they went to church every day of the week, because the church ladies shared out free baked potatoes if you stayed all the way to the end of the service:  now  _ that  _ was poor!

“Hell,” he said finally, “we barely had seven pairs of underpants!  We didn’t have  _ one  _ car, much less three.  You know why I ride a bike?  Because being in a car  _ still  _ feels strange to me.  

“But it’s good stuff, the things you have.  And growing up, I probably woulda hated it like  _ poison,  _ called it greedy and indulgent and all kinds of things, but now...  You’re my friend. I want you to have good stuff. And even if it’s  _ not  _ fair, even if it’s stuff I  _ never  _ woulda had...  It’s still good that  _ you  _ get it.”  

Steve had expected the jealousy, was the thing.  He really had. This was all so over the top, so ridiculous, so of course he should have been eaten up inside... but he wasn’t.  He was just happy for Tony, happier still if it meant he got to see him more often. The gnawing fury inside just... wasn’t there.  Contentment had taken its place.

He shrugged awkwardly and finished up with, “That’s all, really.  It’s just... strange.”

Tony’s glass pinged faintly as he tapped his fingers against it, a repeating pattern, over and over again.  He stared at Steve like he was trying to see into Steve’s soul, and then— 

The glass made a small clinking sound as he set it down in the sink.  “Come on,” he said, leading the way towards the garage. 

“What are we doing?” Steve asked, following obediently, chucking the tail end of his carrot in the trash as he passed it.  They had done this before, he remembered: that first night. Tony led, Steve followed... It had ended pretty well, then. He was willing to try it again.

“Bike repairs,” Tony explained, holding the door for Happy who nodded as he passed them on the way in.  

Steve stopped, blinking.   _ “Bike  _ repairs?  But—it’s not broken!”

“Oh, sure—but don’t you believe that I could make it  _ better?”   _

...Steve  _ did  _ believe that, actually. 

* * *

 

Tony worked on the bike for nearly two hours, shooing Steve away to “go poke around his library or something, Jesus” as he worked.  

Steve  _ did  _ poke around the library, actually.  Many of the books appeared to have come with the house, since Steve suspected Tony read biographies about as often as he read the nearly two hundred bodice rippers Steve found collected on the bottom shelves.  But once he had selected a book— _ Devil’s Cub,  _ off the second-to-last shelf and chosen largely because it was a title Steve had once seen his mother reading—he retreated to the garage again, clearing a spot on the enormous workbench and hopping up, one leg crossing over the other, his ankle swinging easily.  

The book was well-written, but didn’t grab him.  He found his eyes drifting continuously to Tony instead, watching the way Tony’s arm muscles flexed as he tightened a bolt or the way his weight shifted as he lifted a heavy part clear of the rest of the bike.  

As he worked, Tony was constantly in motion.  It was a motion that, oddly enough, seemed familiar to Steve.  And not from Howard; Howard’s movements had been those of a scientist, poking, experimenting, discovering...  But Tony wasn’t discovering anything; he  _ knew  _ what he was doing.   _ His  _ movements were purposeful, possessing a smooth drive that Steve remembered from Bucky’s dancing.  Bucky had never been out of control or lost... He had known all the moves.

Tony never stopped to pace around the bike or wonder what to do; if he had done that at all in this process, it was before Steve had come back with the book.  No, he was just moving,  _ progressing,  _ taking one step at a time with no breaks or pauses between them, one piece after another removed, reworked, repaired, replaced, until the machine in front of Steve was almost unrecognizable and yet still, so clearly, the same bike.

“I'm surprised you didn’t put a rocket in the back,” Steve commented when Tony announced he was done, presenting the bike, gleaming, in front of Steve.  Steve found his breath was coming a little short. Strange; he had just been sitting there reading, after all.

Tony snapped his fingers.  “I didn’t? Oh, damn, I  _ knew  _ I forgot something—”

“Ha ha.”  Steve hopped off the workbench and stretch, arms over his head and reaching tall for the ceiling, enjoying the feel of muscles expanding almost to their full length.  “What  _ did  _ you do to her?”

“Eh, not too much.  Swapped out some parts of the engine for ones with more oomph, added a nitro boost if you need it, cleaned up the handling for tighter curves, that sort of thing.”  Tony’s hands ranged over the machine as he listed things off, pointing and demonstrating. Steve couldn’t have looked away if he’d tried. Tony’s fingers were long, deft—desirable.  Steve’s mouth was watering.

“...and I took two tracking devices and a bug out of her, too,” Tony finished.  He nodded at a bucket just outside the open door, filled with a liquid which had steamed and hissed whenever he put metal into it.  “I took the liberty of chucking them in acid for you.”

Steve paused.  

He should have known that SHIELD would have trackers on him, really.  Should have put that together, especially with the revelations that had immediately preceded his revival.  He should have expected that they would be listening in to his conversations in every way they could, but this still seemed like a step too far, tilting the precarious balance of his relationship with his employer down the slope into resentment.  What  _ right  _ did they have?!  But he still  _ knew,  _ too; that was the problem.  He still knew exactly why they had to watch him.

He couldn’t like it, though.  And he couldn’t accept it, either.

“...Thanks,” Steve said, more bitterly than he really meant.  He gave himself a little shake and met Tony’s eyes again, flailing to recapture the previous trajectory of the conversation.  He put on an overly serious straight face, making his eyes wide and sincere. “I’d love to show you my gratitude.”

Tony snorted at him, then smiled slyly.  “When you say ‘gratitude,’ do you by any chance mean ‘penis’?”

“I’d love to show you that, too.”  Steve took a second to appreciate the good news that the bug in his bike was now a melted pile of slag; took another second to put that—all of that—from his mind.  Then he shucked his shirt off before going for his belt. 

“You can definitely do that," Tony said, "do not let me stop you—but no gratitude necessary, here.  This was actually  _ me  _ saying thank you to  _ you,  _ is the thing.  Via the medium of—”  Tony’s hand waved vaguely at the motorcycle beside them.  “—bike repairs.”

Steve paused, belt undone, hands still engaged in opening his flies.  “Was it? For what?”

“Asking the right questions.”  Tony looked away, fidgeting with the handles of the bike and then running a rag over leather that was already clean and gleaming.  “You asked about—the SHIELD contract. Or, actually, and more  _ relevantly,  _ the lack thereof.  And the thing is, there really  _ wasn’t  _ a reason for us not to be selling to SHIELD, except—I’m under contract not to say much, but it was... greed, basically.  Greed and stupidity. Someone wasn’t doing their job, because it turns out they made a lot more money from  _ not  _ doing it.  So. 

“You asked, I followed up, the spotlight swung around to the asshole who was pocketing millions—and now I owe you one.  So. The bike.” Tony gestured. “It is now really, truly, one of a kind. Like, not saying you should, but you definitely  _ could  _ outrun the cops on that thing.  You’ll probably have a hard time  _ not  _ speeding.  Have fun!” He put on a bright smile and waved his hands, but danced backwards a step or two.  

He looked...  awkward, Steve thought.  Not a man who liked saying thank you.

“Your welcome.”  Steve shifted awkwardly, wondering if he should zip back up.  The mood had kind of been spoiled. “I’m glad I was able to help.  But you don’t need to—I mean. This is—helping each other’s just what friends  _ do,  _ isn’t it?”

“Is it?  My friends have mostly used, betrayed and abandoned me, not necessarily in that order.”

“You maybe need better friends.”  

“Well, I have a hell of a good one now.  One I’d love to take good care of.” Tony met his eyes evenly and smiled, a single moment of genuine delight and joy before his gaze darkened, eyes wandering over Steve with intent.  Steve’s pulse pounded, picking back up again. Oh, he thought. Oh, okay: they  _ were  _ doing this, after all.  He licked his lips. Tony looked like a degenerate, rich and filthy and delightful.  

Steve...  _ wanted.   _ It was a feeling that was slowly becoming more familiar, around Tony.

He worked his jaw, trying to ease some saliva into his suddenly dry mouth.  “Okay then,” he agreed. He stepped forward and put his hands on Tony’s hips.  

Kissing Tony was like going for a run after spending all day cooped up in the office, like drinking cool water after an hour in the hot sun.  Something he was supposed to do, that his body was  _ meant  _ to do, and that he hadn’t been doing for far, far too long.  Tony’s mouth was quick, twitching slightly against his as he tried to kiss through a smile.  A wave of relaxation spread up Steve’s spine, rightness sinking into his skin.  _ Yes,  _ his body whispered to him.   _ Yessss...   _

Tony’s nimble fingers skated up Steve’s arm, then down again, ruffling at the blond hairs where they stood up straight.  “You cold?” he asked.

“A little chilly,” Steve admitted.  The September sun had sunk sideways into early afternoon and a brisk breeze was teasing at the trees in the back lot.  And Steve had never liked the cold. 

Tony nodded and slipped from his arms, going to the bench to hit controls.  The garage door lowered—although there was still plenty of light with the sun streaming in through the square windows in it—and a low hum started up: the sound of an electric heater warming itself.  Tony turned back to him, and then jumped when he saw that Steve had followed him over.

“Ninja!”

“Quiet as a cat,” Steve agreed.  He curved his hands under Tony’s ass and brought him closer again, squeezing just to feel the gentle give of muscular flesh.  Tony made a noise—a  _ good  _ noise—into his mouth and then hopped, settling on the workbench, his legs spreading to wrap around Steve’s hips.  It felt good, a warm pressure of thighs on either side of him. Like a belonging space. 

And Tony’s  _ mouth...   _ Mmmm...  

Steve pulled back, breathing hard.  “Yes,” he said shortly. He ran his free hand through Tony’s hair, once, twice, before tightening his fingers and pulling back, exposing the sleek lines of his throat.  

“Fuck— _ yes,” _ Tony agreed, breathless from the position, and from the intent of it.  Steve brushed his lips over a pulse point before digging in with his tongue.   

The heater was working underneath them, now, the scent of toasted dust rising up around them as it burned off its summer slumber.  And the remodeling, Steve supposed. Tony was working his shirt off, arms moving beneath cotton as Steve licked and sucked at a point beneath his ear.  Steve pulled back and helped him out of it, smiling. 

Tony gave him the smile back.  “How do you want me?”

“Hmm, you have any preferences?”

Tony shrugged.  “It’s  _ your  _ thank-you present,” he pointed out, and Steve tilted his head to the side.  

That  _ did  _ kind of change what he would ask for...  

“Okay,” he said, “in that case, I want you over the bike.”  

Tony’s eyes widened and he licked his lips, tongue poking out pink and obscene.  “You got it,” he said huskily hopping down off the bench again and starting for the bike again.  

Steve pulled him back against himself, back to front, grinding against the irresistible curve of Tony’s ass.  “Mmmm...” He slipped his hands around front, under Tony’s arms, working over the button and zip of Tony’s jeans as he breathed into Tony’s ear.  

“Ahhh—damn, Steve...”  Tony shuddered in his arms.  “Your tongue should be  _ illegal.” _

“I work for SHIELD,” he muttered, pulling Tony’s jeans down his hips.  “That means that in at least three countries, it  _ is.”   _

“Good!”  Tony was gasping, grinding back against him, now.  His underwear was tight and red, extremely flattering, gleaming where it curved around the perfect roundness of him.  Steve’s own jeans, still unbuttoned, were sliding slowly downward under their own weight, and Tony’s ass felt amazing pressing against him.  Steve took a second to run his hands down the slight S-shapes of Tony’s waist hips. Steve shuddered as the arousal revved within him, spreading up his spine and down the long muscles of his legs.  

“Yeeeeah,” he said.  His voice was low and breathy, transparent with hunger.  “Yeah, that’s good. I want you—nnnngh, I want to—can I rim you?”

Tony paused, back still turned to Steve.  It was enough to make Steve aware of what he was doing, what he was asking for, and he rushed in to add more words, embarrassed by his own greedy desires.  “I’m still clean," Steve added, "there hasn’t been—and I sent you the letter from the doc, so you know I don’t have anything. And I’ve wanted to since that first night, there’s just something—I want to go  _ really slow  _ with it—”

“I mean, if you want to—yes, absolutely, sure!”  Tony shoved his pants and underwear the rest of the way down and kicked them away, stepping away from Steve and crawling over the bike, laying down across the seat with his arms and legs on each side.  His movements were jerky, almost robotic, and for a second Steve worried that he didn’t really want it until Tony shifted, adjusting for an erection on the bike.  _ Oh.  Oh!  _

It wasn’t that Tony  _ didn’t  _ want his tongue, it was that Tony wanted it  _ really kind of a lot.   _ Tony’s face was turned away, but his voice confirmed it, full of barely-contained eagerness when he asked, “Like this?”

And, damn, Tony  _ did  _ look good, all spread out over Steve’s bike like that was his lover.  But—“No.” Steve stepped around the bike and lifted, getting Tony’s ass in the air—damn!   _ Damn! _ —until Tony got with the program and got his legs under him.  “Like this.” 

Tony nodded, head against the leather of Steve’s bike’s seat, and his hands reached up to grip the handlebars, either needing the support or needing something to do.  Either way, Steve wasn’t going to say no to seeing Tony stretched out with his arms over his head like that...

Steve took a second to run his hands over Tony’s body, possessive and vaguely guilty about his possessiveness, before cupping the perfect globes of his asscheeks each in one hand and spreading them.  Tony’s hole was dark between them, the skin shading to dusky pink-beige. Steve leaned in and inhaled, catching the musky scent of ball sweat and the saltiness of arousal. He let his breath rush out hot over Tony’s hole and breathed in again, appreciating the way Tony shuddered under him.

“Jesus—Jesus, Steve, just—just do it—”

Steve touched the tip of his tongue to the pucker, tasting experimentally.  He had half-expected, when he first heard of this so many years ago, that there would be a taste, a foulness to it; after all, it  _ was  _ an ass.  But instead, all he tasted was the familiar salt of sweat and sweetness of skin—whether Tony’s ass was particularly clean or because there really just  _ wasn’t  _ a taste, he couldn’t know.   Still, that first tentative lick emboldened him.  He swept more broadly with his tongue, smooth, strong strokes that had Tony shivering under him and straining against the handlebars of the bike.  

“Okay?” Steve murmured, checking in.  The position had him speaking the words directly into Tony’s skin, and that, too, made Tony shudder.  

“Jesus fucking  _ Christ.”   _

Well, alright then. 

Steve dove in, licking in, around, over the hole, letting his mouth linger until the tight-clenched muscles went loose and giving under his tongue.  He swept in, prodding into the hot, silky inside, Tony moaning above him. It was a good sound, that moan. Like Tony was dying, like Steve had completely succeeded in silencing his overactive mind.   Like he was lost to arousal and overstimulation, and the only thing holding him to the world was his grip on the handlebars. 

Yeah, Steve liked that moan a  _ lot.   _

He added teeth to the mix, first scraping gently over the swollen flesh and then, when that made Tony shout and spasm, adding in bites to the sensitive inner sides of Tony’s cleft, where the cheeks plumped roundly enough for a good grip.  With every motion of his mouth, Tony’s sounds became more brokenly delighted; with every stroke of his tongue, Tony sobbed and went just that little bit more pliant beneath him. 

He kept it up, lost to outside world or even the passing of time, just lips and tongue and the worship of Tony’s very, very fine ass.  Outside the garage there was nothing; inside the garage, there was burning dust and newly-spilled oil, and still it was nothing in the face of Tony, beneath him, out of his mind with lust.  

Still, even this couldn’t last forever.  After a while, even this—the pleasure of watching and feeling Tony come apart around him—faded into a sameness, and he knew it was time to move on.  He coughed, his throat suddenly tight. “Tony,” he said. “Tony!”

Tony moaned.

“I can make you come like this, if you want.  I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take much. Right?”

Tony moaned again.  It kind of sounded like a yes.

“But I want—I mean, you don’t  _ have  _ to, I know it’s not something you do too often, you said that—but I really want to fuck you.  Can I do that?”

Tony moaned a third time.  It still sounded like yes, so Steve picked him up bodily, bundling his whole self into his arms, and then shifted him to the left, leaving his right hand free.  Hopefully, if Tony did notice he was using superstrength, he’d be too distracted to remember it. 

There was a wet spot where Tony’s cock had drooled on Steve’s bike seat.  Steve wanted to lean over and lick it clean, but his arms were too full of Tony to reach.

With his right hand, Steve found the catch on the back of the bike and released it.  He pried the the seat up, revealing a small cargo compartment underneath. He pulled out the lube and condoms, tossing each to the floor before shutting it again, then turned Tony around and set him down, facing backwards on the bike.

Tony was laughing, his eyes a little too wide.  “You keep those in your bike?”

“I do when I’m coming to see you.”  Steve shut Tony up with a kiss, smiling slightly as Tony sighed and kissed him back, any trace of tension having fled his body once more.  

“Mmm, that’s nice...  God. Oooh, yeah, take those off.  Jesus! I  _ remember  _ that cock, you should  _ definitely  _ fuck me.  I thought this was  _ me  _ thanking  _ you?” _

“Well, you know, it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.”  Steve handed Tony the condom, and after blinking a few times Tony managed to focus enough to get it on Steve, rolling it down with hands that were so  _ strong  _ and so  _ nimble...   _ “Jesus Christ!”  

Steve caught Tony’s hand as he pulled it away, pressing a kiss to the palm, then out to each one of the long, nimble fingers.  

Tony panted and whined, high in his throat.  Steve met his eyes. “Yeah?” he asked, checking in again.

“Please,” Tony begged.  “Good. Yes. Please, fuck me, do it— _ ahh, holy shit!”   _

Steve paused, the head of his cock still breached in Tony’s entrance.  “No?”

“No—yeah, okay, yes, but—Jesus Christ, you’re huge—okay, I got this, I...”  Tony wiggled, working his way down Steve’s cock. Steve’s eyes crossed, and he focused very hard and suddenly on the latest baseball statistics.  Tony was impossibly tight and hot around him. 

Too late, Steve remembered that he probably should have stretched Tony out first, but Tony didn’t exactly seem inclined to stop and take care of it now.  Instead he wormed his way closer, wriggling his way to having Steve seated completely inside him. When he got there he groaned, letting his head fall forward onto Steve’s shoulder.  “Jesus... Jesus fucking Christ I hate you, why is your dick so big,  _ how  _ is your dick so big?”  

_ Borderline-morality experiments by a formerly-German scientist during the height of the second World War,  _ Steve thought and didn’t say.  He kissed the closest of Tony’s ears and the edge of his sweaty forehead.  “It’s not  _ that  _ big...”

“From my point of view—which is, uhhh, the point of view of the guy with it  _ inside him,  _ let me tell you, it is  _ enormous—” _

Steve laughed softly.  Tony had a lock of curling brown hair falling into his eyes.  Steve brushed it aside. 

“—and I think that makes it the most valid—no, the  _ only  _ valid—perspective there is, really— _ ohhhh, GOD!” _

Steve had shifted his hips a little bit, the baby brother to a thrust.

“Fuck!  Fuck, fuck...”  Tony’s hand had found his own cock, and he was stroking it loosely.  He had softened somewhat while he was getting Steve inside him—Steve had noticed, and tried not to worry about it.  But he was hardening again now, his ass relaxing around Steve’s shaft, eyes falling shut halfway in an expression of bliss that Steve could frankly see every day and not get tired of.  Or, well... At least see a lot more often than he did.

“Ohhhh good, that’s good, that’s the stuff—go on, Steve, give it to me, I can  _ take it—!” _

Steve had gathered Tony into his arms enough to raise him up and bring him down again on his cock, a smooth, deep thrust that Tony, apparently, had choked on.  

“Can you?”

“Ahhh, yeah—yeah, I can...”  Tony’s hands reached for Steve’s chest, scratching all over like a hellcat, nails occasionally scraping Steve’s nipples and making him shudder.  Steve pulled back and thrust in again, nice and slow, then pulled out once more and slathered more lube everywhere before starting a solid rhythm.  In and out, in and out— _ god  _ it was good!  Tony was tight around his cock,  _ so  _ tight, the heat inside of him blinding even through the condom.  And the  _ noises!   _ Tony was almost hiccuping, snarling and babbling, all kinds of wild sounds pulled from him and Steve was living for it, loving it, desperate to hear one more not-even-a-word as he thrust into the close heat of him again and again.

Tony came first, spattering jism all over himself, his hands clenching on the handlebars so hard the bike revved and shrieked beneath them.  Steve braced his feet and lifted again, pulling Tony towards him in four short, sharp thrusts, finally burying his cock to the hilt and slumping forward, barely catching himself before toppling the bike to the ground.  

They lay together on the bike, panting.

“You’re welcome,” Steve muttered, tongue flickering as he tasted the sweat on Tony’s chest.

Tony laughed, happy and relaxed beneath him.

 

* * *

 

They stayed that way for close to half an hour, warm from the garage’s heater, happy from good sex and the cheerful sideways slant of autumn sunlight.  They didn’t talk much as they rested, and what conversation they did have was mostly made of bad jokes. It was... nice, though.  _ Easy,  _ Steve thought, and something in his chest unwound, something tight and coiled that he hadn’t even realized was there until it let go.  This was easy; this was simple. It was good to have friends.

“Wanna stay til later?” Tony invited him once they were dressed again.  They were standing in Tony’s kitchen; Tony had just handed Steve a beer.  Steve was pretty sure even so that Tony wasn’t just worried about him driving the bike drunk, though.

“How much later are we talking?”  There was supposed to be a storm moving in overnight, and intermediate showers all the next day.  If Tony was inviting him to stay the night, Steve was inclined to say no—no matter how many bedrooms this new house had.  

As it turned out, though, Tony wasn’t talking about that.  “I know half the people I’m friends with are assholes, but these are the okay ones.  Seriously, Rhodey’s been with me through thick and thin, and also a number of other textures, Jun is a stand-up guy, Darsh is one of the smartest guys I know—”

“Alright.”

“—and, okay, Nikki’s not technically a guy but you’ll  _ like  _ her, she’s  _ great—” _

“I said alright, Tony!”

“—and it’s just—oh.  Oh, you did, didn’t you?  Holy shit, thank you, seriously—Darsh gets so  _ pissy  _ when it isn’t Texas Hold ‘Em, and you really  _ need  _ six for that.  Wait, do you know how to play...?  This isn’t one of your crazy Amish things, is it?”

Steve felt his eyebrows shoot up, and was just annoyed enough to let them.  “Crazy  _ Amish  _ things?!”

Tony just waved his hand dismissively, though.  “You have sex now, but you didn’t used to; you carry a phone, but you don’t play any stupid phone games; you didn’t know who The Who are...  I always figured you were raised Amish or something, and were keeping it close because honestly that is just  _ begging  _ for mockery, I would also not tell anyone, no hard feelings.  And, I mean, that’s obviously not where you’re at  _ now,  _ so—none of my business, right?”

Steve took a long swig of his beer, letting the beverage warm in his mouth, letting himself notice the way the flavors changed as it lingered there, as the carbonation popped up towards his sinuses.  

He swallowed.

“Not exactly,” he said finally.  “But—close enough. And you’re right, I don’t like to talk about it.”

“So we won’t, then,” Tony said, obvious relief rolling off his shoulders.  “Hey, I’ll give you your stake for poker—don’t give me that look, Nikki’s a  _ snake  _ at this game, trust me you will need it—”

 

* * *

 

Tony was right:  Steve mostly liked his friends.  Tony introduced Steve as “Secret Agent Steve, I’m trying to convince him to run away to Bermuda with me.”  

“It’s the little bikini,” Steve said sadly, shaking Jun’s hand.  “I draw the line at anything I can’t hide a .22 caliber and an exploding pen in.”  

Jun’s eyes widened behind round lenses, and although he didn’t laugh out loud, his shoulders shook.  “I’m sure we can find you something,” he said. 

His voice was quiet, but with the Tidewater accent of a Virginia native, and he had the pallor and too-thin frame of someone whose job was almost entirely performed at a desk.  He turned out to be a computer genius and all-around inventor, who quite possibly  _ could  _ come up with some kind of super-concealing swimwear.  “A reclusive, hidden jewel,” Tony called him. 

Jun just shook his head and countered, “an anxious, agoraphobic mess.”  He smiled softly at Steve and said, “No offense, but if I’d known you would be here, I wouldn’t have come.”

“That is  _ precisely  _ why I didn’t tell you.”  Tony either ignored or didn’t see the fondly exasperated look Jun shot at his back.  “No, come on, you’ll  _ like  _ Steve.”  

And, apparently, he did:  by the time Jun had finished his share of the beer, he was toppling sideways, and Steve ended up serving as half-buttress, half-pillow for him.  

Tony shook his head fondly.  “He’s not hitting on you, by the way—Jun is ridiculously loyal to his asshole husband, who you will note was  _ not  _ invited tonight—but if he does, go for it, we tried that back in the day and he was  _ epically  _ attentive.”

“Thanks,” Steve said, uncomfortable for a number of reasons.  He shifted Jun sideways until he was in a more stable position, then went back to his cards.

Darsh was  _ hilarious,  _ but a little mean with it; Nikki, Darsh’s wife, was sleek and just as mean, but underneath that she had a kindness to her that Steve approved of.  Nikki was a surgeon at Georgetown, and taught classes at the college when she wasn’t operating.

Darsh, much to Steve’s surprise, worked for SHIELD.  

“Good god, do you really?" Tony said.  "I’m hearing that name a lot these days.  How did I not know this? I’m sure you’ve never told me this before...”  Tony made a show of popping the lid off another beer for Steve as he spoke, but Steve could read tension on him in his shoulders and in the height to which he had raised his eyebrows.

Darsh waved his glass dismissively.  “I have told you three times, and you were drunk for all of them, darling.”  

Steve blinked at the endearment, glancing at Nikki, but Nikki was sitting close to Jun and talking softly with him about his husband—a conversation Steve was quickly able to realize that neither he nor anyone else in the room was supposed to be able to hear.  At any rate, she hadn’t noticed Darsh flirting with Tony. 

Neither had Tony, to all appearances.  He brushed onward without saying anything about it.  “Steve here works for SHIELD, too—do you know each other?”

“SHIELD has close to two thousand employees just in the DC metro area,” said Darsh, “so no.”  He eyed Steve up and down and took a swig of the wine Tony had poured for him without asking his preference.  “Let me guess: operations?”

“Mostly.”  Steve found he couldn’t care much for the little snear with which Darsh had said the word.  Operations was the guys who went out on missions, and it was true enough that that was mostly what Steve did.  But Fury and Maria Hill had also folded him effortlessly into the leadership team, and if Darsh didn’t already know that, Steve didn’t feel the need to tell him.

Darsh nodded like Steve had confirmed more than he had said.  “I’m in analytics,” Darsh offered. “Can’t say much, but basically it’s data data data, and then a pattern jumps out and I send it to boys like you so you can hit it.”

“Well, I have to thank you, then,” Steve said mildly.  “It’s always good to have things that need hit.”

Nikki won Steve over not just with her wit, but with the way she tempered herself as soon as it looked like she was going too far:  Rhodey she only poked a couple of times, Jun she didn’t needle at all. And despite the slight snobbery of him, an intellectual superiority complex that grated on Steve’s nerves, Darsh proved to be entertaining company, sarcastic and charming in a way that brought a sparkle to the whole room.  And the superiority faded instantly when Darsh was talking to the other people in the room, people Darsh apparently considered equals, so Steve gave him points for that. It meant Darsh wasn’t so much an ass as just wrong  _ about Steve,  _ and Steve had been around enough people who thought he was dumb that Darsh didn’t exactly stand out on that front.

Steve wasn’t above using it to fleece him out of a couple thousand dollars, though.

Rhodey—Jim Rhodes, it turned out—was the last of Tony’s guests to arrive, and the first to leave, but for all that, Steve liked him best.  Maybe it was because he was the only one with military background—although, he was Air Force, and obviously that only barely counted. Maybe it was because he was so obviously fond of Tony, although Steve was getting the feeling that Rhodes might be the only one in the room Tony  _ hadn’t  _ ever slept with.  Or maybe it was just that same gut instinct that had let Steve know, instantly, that the Howling Commandos were good people, and that he should keep them around.  

There was something in that thought that caught him, something that niggled at the back of his mind, little exclamation points of awareness snaking down his spine.  Steve shifted his weight and made a mental note to think about it more.

Maybe he could distract Dr. Chan with it.

Whatever it was, Steve wasn’t questioning it.  By the end of the night, Steve had passed Rhodes his cell phone for the entering in of contact information.  “If you ever need me,” Steve told him, “call.” And then, considering that this was the friend of Tony’s who Steve most trusted so far, he added, “Also if Tony ever needs me.”

Rhodes smiled and nodded, and entered his name into Steve’s phone.

 

* * *

 

The weather turned, as it had been predicted to do, and by the time Steve was taking the steps of his apartment two at a time, he was drenched from the sluicing autumn rain.  He didn’t care. In fact he found, as he waved to his neighbor Kate—her eyes drifted downward, and her brows drifted up—that he was grinning like a lunatic. 

He was soaked to the bone, but he was also the happiest he had been since Pearl Harbor.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mental health content warnings in the endnotes (as in, cw: mental health complications).

Steve hadn’t been wrong about Tony wanting more rooms to fuck in, but that wasn’t the only reason he’d bought the mansion, either.  What he’d told Steve about increased business in the DC area had been true, and not even a euphemism: with the ousting of Marv Lindstrom from the Board, SI was suddenly bidding on—and getting—a lot more contracts.  Turned out that while the military world had been getting their fill of SI’s wares, the _extra_ military organizations—SHIELD, police departments, even the damned CIA—were hungry for the higher quality SI provided.

Imagine that, right?

Lindstrom was a fat, insider-trading piece of shit and Tony really hoped the charges against him landed him some real jail time.  He had set SI back _billions_ with his fucking greed.

So Tony really did have a plausible reason for buying the mansion, which really _was_ cheaper than the hotel room long-term, if he was going to be in town so much more often...

...but _that_ wasn’t the whole reason he’d bought it, either.

 

* * *

 

With one thing and another, it was almost three weeks before Tony even called Steve again, which was fine.  

Tony paused as he was walking down the stairs of the Capital Building to smile wryly out over the Mall, aware once again of the sheer _relief_ of having a friends-with-benefits situation.  No anxious calls in the middle of the night—okay, the afternoon, whatever—wondering where he was, no guilt trips for a lag time between phone calls and visits...  Just two dudes, hanging out, hooking up when they felt like it.

_Bliss._

God, it was so much easier than all his failed attempts at romance.

“Steve!  Hey! You busy tomorrow night?”

There was some sort of wind noise on the other end of the phone, and Tony knew by the faint pause what the answer was going to be before Steve said anything.  “Sorry, Tony, I’m, uh... I’m actually out of the country, I’m on assignment...”

“Got it.  No problem!  Call me sometime when you get back.”

Tony felt a little disappointed as he hung up the phone, but shrugged and moved on.  The only other people in his DC rolodex-of-fun were Jun—who never had sex with Tony anymore, not since his marriage, and who never did anything on such short notice anyway—and Nikki and Darsh, who were great, but usually wanted the kind of sex that took a little more brains than Tony felt like putting into it.  

Maybe he’d spend some quality time in the workshop tonight, instead.

 

* * *

 

“How did you feel about that?  About saying no to him?”

Dr. Chan was sitting upright in her chair, as always, the composition book open on her lap.  Steve entertained a brief fantasy of pulling out a lighter and setting the book on fire, then uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way, stalling for time.  

“It was fine,” he said when he was out of delays.  “Tony didn’t seem bothered.”

“Were _you_ bothered?”

“Not really.”  The sex would have been nice.  A hell of a lot nicer than the mission was, that was for sure.

The mission was the reason he was talking to Dr. Chan about his sex life:  as long as he was talking about Tony, the mission would stay safely undiscussed.  And the mission had been a disaster, so Steve _really_ didn’t feel like talking about it.  His current team was going to be the death of him; they ruined every other mission, it seemed like, despite being individually competent people.  

“So what do you think will happen if you say no to Tony a lot?”

Steve frowned.

It was an odd question for Dr. Chan to be asking.  It sounded like she was implying that Tony was only interested in Steve because Steve was willing to have sex with him.  Which was wrong: they were friends; he and Tony had agreed on that. It made Steve very uncomfortable. He squirmed on Dr. Chan’s square, ugly couch, wrestling with his answer and why the question made him feel so sick.  

“He’d leave,” Steve admitted, putting it into words for the first time.  “I mean, not leave, he’s not _with me,_ but...  We would drift apart.  Wouldn’t be friends anymore.”

His stomach twisted against itself, aching and—since he had skipped lunch—empty.

“How do you feel about that?” Dr. Chan asked.  Her voice was overly neutral, so carefully non-judgemental that it was, itself, a judgement.  There was a hint of something almost pleased at the corners of her eyes—had he made some kind of a breakthrough he didn’t know about?

Steve ignored the way his guts were roiling and shrugged.  “That’s just how it is, isn’t it?”

Dr. Chan tapped her pen against the composition book, saying nothing.

“What I mean is—imagine _you_ had a friend—”   _Don’t strain too hard,_ he snarked mentally—“but your friend never had time for you, never came over when you needed them, never spent an hour on the phone with you even—you just caught their voicemail all the time.”  Steve waited until Dr. Chan was nodding slowly before he went on: “Would you say that you and that person were really even friends?”

Dr. Chan’s pen pecked away at the notebook like a particularly angry woodpecker.  After thirty taps, she told him, “There are different types of friends, Steve. What I am suggesting to you—what I had hoped you had realized when I asked you that question—was that you and Tony might not be particularly the kind of friends you think you are.”

Steve’s gut twisted again.  Not apprehension this time: anger.  “And what kind of friends... do you think we are.”

Dr. Chan was very smart:  she immediately began trying to look conciliatory.  “I’m sure the feelings you have are real,” she said.  Her face was smooth, her voice soothing. “I’m not suggesting that what you feel doesn’t count.  I just think it may count _more_ than you believe it does.  I think you should examine that.”  

Steve chewed his tongue and said nothing.

Dr. Chan’s pen was still, but the awkward length of time before she spoke again was the same thirty seconds it had always been.  “This doesn’t sound like just friendship,” she said finally. She sounded like mother lying to a small child about their dog and the farm upstate.

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it again with a snap.  His jaw clenched. His pulse was pounding too fast in his neck, anger surging out through his arteries with every pump of his heart.   _She doesn’t know,_ he thought.   _She doesn’t fucking know!_

Tony wasn’t the... the _fond focus of his heart,_ or whatever it was Dr. Chan was imagining.  Tony was a goddamn _lifeline_ that kept him from sinking forever under the waves.  Tony was _helping,_ damn it!  And Steve was able—luckily, _miraculously—_ to help Tony, too.

What else were friendships made of, when you came right down to it?  Actions and mutual affection: that was the basic recipe of them, right there.  

And was Steve able to _imagine_ feeling more?  Sure. Could there ever come a day when Steve looked at Tony with his heart in his eyes—looked at Tony the way he had once looked at Peggy?  Of course. It wasn’t like Tony wasn’t his type: dark, clever, and more interested in Steve Rogers than Captain America. There was something missing, so far, some barrier between them that had kept Steve from giving away his heart—and thanks to a recent discussion with Fury, Steve had a pretty good idea what that something was—but eventually, Steve would probably fall in love.  It was less a question of _if_ than _when,_ at this point.

But Tony also wasn’t interested in anything else.  He had made it very clear that the day Steve showed up with a Valentine’s card would be the day they parted ways, so for as long as he could, Steve was going to try to not do that.

Even if it meant crushing his feelings down into a little ball and hiding them inside, so deep that not even he himself could find them.

And now Dr. Chan was showing up and waving around a shovel, insisting he should dig them up again?  No. Hell, no.

“I am _not,”_ Steve snarled, “in love with him!”

But his stomach crawled, because the end of that sentence was, “Not _yet,_ anyway...”

 

* * *

 

Steve’s next mission left him exhausted and cranky, itching under his skin in a way he knew too well how to take care of.

He called Tony.

He knew the second Tony answered the phone that he wasn’t going to be able to help, though.  There was something about Tony’s voice, something in the timbre that was more relaxed when Tony was home, in California, that wasn’t there when he was globetrotting.

Fair enough; Steve had had to turn Tony down three times in the last couple months, himself.  Still a bummer, though. Plus that meant it had been almost three weeks since they had seen each other, and that was definitely getting to be too long.

“I’m so sorry,” Tony told him.  “Honestly, if I thought you’d accept it, I would fly you out here—I could really stand to see you, myself.”

It was nice to be needed.  It was nice to be needed _by Tony._

Steve shoved that thought into a hole and started shoveling dirt on top.

“Too much time spent on a plane already today,” Steve said dismissively, and it was even true:  he had flown ten hours to reach the mission site, and another ten back. And then three locked in Fury’s office talking about what he had learned—or at least suspected he had learned.  Most of those three hours had been spent going back and forth on which it was.... “I’ll just have a beer or two and crash. Thanks anyway, Tony.”

Not that the beers would work on him, but Tony didn’t need to know that.  Not until Steve was sure, anyway.

“Well, take care of yourself.  And have something to eat before you go to bed!  You like pizza?”

When Steve got home, there was a Supreme Deep Dish waiting on the steps with a delivery girl who told him, in an awed sort of voice, that _Mr. Stark_ had already taken care of the payment, and had given her a _two-hundred dollar tip!_  

Steve just laughed.  At least Tony tipped well with all that money of his.

And the pizza was _delicious,_ actually.

 

* * *

 

“You seem somewhat worried about your relationship.”

“Oh I do, huh?”

“In my experience, Steven, people who are secure in their relationships begin thinking about the next steps.”

She was fishing, then.

Steve hadn’t been sure, when she first brought the subject up.  Maybe he really _had_ seemed worried.  It was true enough that they weren’t getting to see each other too often—although their previous series of misses had been ended this weekend with three glorious rounds of slow, mind-melting sex, Tony taking Steve apart with hands and mouth and cock, over and over, until Steve had been drooling and moaning wordlessly into the pillows.  But the past weekend notwithstanding, their recent record wasn’t that great...

That wasn’t what Dr. Chan was asking about, though.  She was asking about why he wasn’t pushing for romance.  

And _that_ meant she was fishing.

“Tony doesn’t want the next steps, Dr. Chan.”

Steve had told her that before.  Several times, actually. He was getting annoyed with it, and starting to wonder if he was being unreasonable.

Dr. Chan’s lips pressed together, then relaxed again.  “Do you?”

Steve shifted in his seat.  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.  He was sure about this part—no matter how many times she asked him—but he wasn’t sure about how to say it.  “Doc, it really _doesn’t_ matter.  If your... your friend... has made it clear what the terms of the relationship are, pressing for a change to those terms...  It’s, well... rude? At best. And I’m... content, as it is. I really am.”

It was good to have a friend who wanted him for something _Steve Rogers_ could provide just fine.

“You aren’t satisfied.”  Dr. Chan said it like it was a fact and not her opinion, like it was a foregone conclusion, not even worth arguing about.  Steve wondered if she was right. He knew that for now—right now—he _was_ satisfied, but he also knew that the edges of that state were crumbling.  

Soon enough Tony _would_ come to mean more.  He didn’t know what he would do when that happened.

“But you mean it when you say you won’t move on,” Dr. Chan was continuing.  “I wonder why. Maybe you’re scared?” Steve instinctively scowled at the suggestion, and Dr. Chan raised an eyebrow.  “Your last lover rejected you after your imprisonment in the ice; that must have hurt. Maybe you’ve become more hesitant to trust people.”  

Steve’s scowl remained, but his certainty didn’t.  He _should_ be able to trust Tony... but there were a lot of people he should be able to trust who, it turned out, weren’t trustworthy at all.

Tony was Howard’s son.  But seventy years was a long time, and from the sound of things Tony and his father weren’t really close.

...It was time for a distraction.

“I had an idea about that, recently.”  Steve crossed his legs back the other way again and sat back in his chair, getting more comfortable.  “About why I trusted the Howlies, but didn’t trust Brandt...” He outlined his theory, that he was noticing something so small that he didn’t even know he was picking up on it, a microexpression or a smell or something, and that that was why he instantly trusted some people and instantly disliked others.

Dr. Chan, hooked like a fish on a line, leaned forward and listened.

 

* * *

 

 

“Steve, are you in town?  I need a favor.”

“Sure.”  Steve tucked the phone between his ear and chin to look down at himself.  He wasn’t still in his pajamas, at least—he went for an early morning run every day, which was as good a reason as any to make himself take a shower—but he wasn’t dressed to go visit his fella, either.  “I can’t come over quite yet, I’ll need to change—and I thought you were out of town?” He frowned as he remembered why he and Tony didn’t already have plans. “Wasn’t there a conference?”

“There was, there is, that’s why I need you.”

“I can’t fly out there, Tony, I’m on call.  I can’t be in _Europe—”_

“I know, I know, I need you there!  I mean, in DC. I mean—It’s Jun, okay?  He’s supposed to check in with JARVIS every other week—mental health reasons—and he hasn’t.  He’s two days past due.”

Steve paused in the middle of getting the milk out, standing in the open doorway of the refrigerator as that struck him.  “What kind of mental health reasons? Do we need to be calling an ambulance, here? Why has it been two days?”

“It shouldn’t be _that_ bad.  Jun avoids the outside world when he’s not doing well; he has anxiety, and new things, new people, public spaces...  All of those feel unsafe to him. He winds up hunkering down a lot, and when his mental space is really bad, he can’t even reach out.  The call is just to make sure he’s not too bad yet.”

Steve nodded, relieved, and went back to getting his cereal.  “So I don’t need to worry about self harm?”

“Eh, I won’t say he _never_ does, but usually there’s a lot more warning than I’ve had.  More missed check-ins first, too. I’ll usually give him a day of grace, and he usually catches it before I have to worry.  He got an extra day this time because Mark left town yesterday—that’s his husband. Mark hates when Jun talks to me—jealous—so I could see Jun putting it off until after Mark was gone.”

“But it’s been two days, and no call?”

“Yeah.  I need—”  Tony cut the upward spiral of his voice abruptly.  He took a shaky breath—a loud one, Steve could hear it over the phoneand started over.  “I need someone to go check on him at this point. Rhodey’s at the conference with me, Nikki and Darsh are in Geneva... and Jun likes you.”

 

* * *

 

Jun’s house was in Northern Virginia, not far from Tony’s mansion.  While it was smaller than Tony’s ridiculous home, it was on a much larger plot of land:  Steve couldn’t see the house from the road at all, and the driveway was a good quarter of a mile long, at least.  The woods around it were heavy and brilliant, changing colors in the dripping November rain. All told, the overall impression was one of privacy, first and foremost.

Good for brilliant inventors.  Bad for agoraphobes who got locked into their own brains easily.

Steve parked around back and made his way up the porch stairs.  The “porch” was almost too massive to merit the name; it was a hardwood-slatted wrap-around affair whose door opened into the second story, not the first.  A long flight of stairs took Steve up from the open paved space behind the garage, “where the family parks,” as Tony had said.

The porch—more of a balcony, really—had planters every three feet.  Steve counted them off, then rummaged beneath the sixth hydrangea for the key Tony had promised him would be there.  Even if it weren’t, though, Steve wasn’t worried: ninety percent of the wall he was walking next to was glass, a sort of sunroom on the other side.  If he had to, Steve could definitely break in.

The key was right where Tony had promised, though, and the sunroom inside was on the cool end of room temperature.  Steve shivered and wiped his feet on the mat in front of the door.

He called Jun’s name as he went through the house, not wanting to be mistaken for a burglar.  No response, though. Jun wasn’t anywhere on the second story of the house. The third story was smaller, and he cleared it quickly before making his way down the stairs to where the bedrooms—and Jun’s work study—were located.

He stepped off the stairs on a thick gray carpet.  The stairs gave onto a hallway, stretching back the length of the house, and Steve followed it down, cracking each door and peering around it, endlessly calling Jun’s name.  A den and then an office, computer screen still dark; a library whose windows faced the open slope of the hillside; a laundry room, a bedroom—spare, it looked like, with the bed unslept in and no personal touches about the place—and then—

Jun was in the bathroom, the room at the back, interior corner of the house.  No windows, and surrounded on all sides by earth; Steve was sure it wasn’t a coincidence.  Jun was in the tub, fully dressed and soaked. Water lapped nipple-level at his chest, wicking up the clinging linen shirt he wore to his shoulders. And not warm water, either; testing finger revealed that if this was a bath, it had been drawn several hours ago.  

“Jun!”  

Steve was close, kneeling now next to the tub with no clear memory of how he had gotten there.  Bath products scattered around his knees and he brushed them irritably aside. “Jun?!”

Jun said nothing, shivering convulsively.  His eyes were wide, but stared at nothing as tears tracked unnoticed down his cheeks.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings! Take care of yourselves, people-- this chapter may be a good on to skip around in as needed!
> 
> 1\. Depiction of a not-very-good therapist. They're not all like her!!! Any scene with him talking to Dr. Chan.  
> 2\. Depiction of a dissociative episode by an OC. Final scene of the chapter, starts with Steve entering Jun's home. Also the first scene of next chapter as currently written; when I post that one, I'll probably put warnings on it, too.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Should* I wait for the final round of feedback? I definitely should. Am I patient enough for that? No I am not. Let's do this!

 

There were times when the right thing to do was the wrong thing, and this was one of them.

The “right” thing to do, Steve knew, would be to call EMS, get an ambulance to the house.  Jun’s condition was bad enough to merit hospitalization. But Steve didn’t trust that, didn’t trust the mental health system in general and for someone like Jun in particular.  He remembered that Jun didn’t like to meet new people; hard to imagine new people  _ in a hospital  _ would go over any better.  

He took Jun to Tony’s house, instead.  It was just up the road, maybe fifteen minutes, and it was familiar enough that Jun might come out of his shell when he got there.  He couldn’t exactly carry an unresponsive body out of the house on his motorcycle, so he hotwired Jun’s Volvo, buckling Jun carefully into the back seat.  He called Tony on the way, got his voicemail, and left a message updating him on the situation. 

JARVIS let them in at the gate.

Steve parked in the only open spot in the garage and tried not to remember the last time he had parked there, when he'd ended up rimming Tony over his bike.  This wasn’t the time to be distracted by something like that. He carried Jun into the house, cradled gently in his arms. Jun still wasn’t responding, wasn’t looking at him; he was barely even blinking, and Steve wondered if the tears were maybe more from dry eyes than being upset.  It didn’t matter, of course—obviously, Jun was  _ actually  _ upset, too.  

Steve made his way upstairs, finding one of the five million bedrooms Tony had in this place.  He matter of factly pulled Jun’s wet clothes off of him. A quick scan of the closet and dresser told him they were empty, so Steve ducked down the hall and sprinted to Tony’s room, pulling a loose shirt and soft pants out of the wardrobe there.  He didn’t bother with replacement underwear; hopefully Jun wouldn’t mind too much.

He tucked Jun in beneath the blanket, propping his head up on the pillow and praying it was comfortable.  Jun still didn’t close his eyes, though. He just stared at the ceiling, blinking occasionally but never settling down.

He was still shivering, too.  Steve frowned. 

Start by adding another blanket, he decided.  It  _ was  _ slightly cool in here, same as it had been in Jun’s house.  And there was bound to be a linen closet  _ somewhere _ on this level.

Steve ducked out through the door and scanned the hallway for closets before deciding on a better plan.  Jun and Tony used to be a thing, right? So maybe the smell would help. He went back to Tony’s room and stripped the thick duvet off the bed, bundling it untidily in his arms for the return trip.  

He spread the duvet over Jun by snapping it into the air and watching it drift down over him, then came around and pulled it away from Jun’s round face.  He watched for a few minutes as the shivering stopped but the blinking continued, then sighed and kicked off his shoes.

Time for the emergency measures.

Steve crawled under the covers with a sense of inevitability.  Tony always said he was a space heater of a man; he should have known it would come to this.  Steve wrapped his arms around Jun and turned onto his back, pulling Jun over to mash his head against Steve’s chest.  Maybe the heartbeat would soothe him.

Whatever it was—the warmth finally sinking in, the heartbeat, Tony’s blankets—it finally did the trick.  Finally,  _ finally,  _ Jun’s lashes sank down, slowly but with finality, covering his eyes as he fell into the depths of a healing sleep.

 

* * *

 

Steve woke in the morning, sitting up slightly to the sight of a wild-eyed Jun staring at him from six inches away.

Steve pasted on a smile.  “Hey, you’re up! How you doing?”

Jun didn’t look comforted by Steve’s light tone; instead, his breathing grew more rapid, his gaze more confused and despairing.  “What—happened?” 

“It’s fine,” Steve said quickly.  “Really—I mean, nothing happened between  _ us,  _ anyway.  Tony said you missed the check-in, so... I...”

But Jun’s face was filling with grief, closing off again.  Jun buried face in the pillows, body shifting away from Steve’s.  His shoulders were rounded and—once again—shaking. Steve was pretty sure he wasn’t cold this time, though.

“I remember now.”  Jun sounded sad, infinitely sad.  As if he had held an ancient and fragile teapot before dropping it and watching it shatter.  “Oh, God.” 

Tentatively, Steve reached out a hand and patted at the nearest shoulder.  “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jun shuddered and snuffled for a second before answering.  “...No...”

Steve patted again.  There really wasn’t much else he could  _ do.   _ He didn’t know what was going on, didn’t understand and couldn’t without Jun telling him.  The world Jun was dealing with—the obvious fear on him, the grief and pain, the darkness of his perceptions like moving constantly through an overly dim room—these were things Steve had only experienced a taste of.  And it wasn’t the same to have seen them from the outside.

In another life he would have known this more intimately.  Steve was keenly aware that he was lucky; if he hadn’t had Tony...  If he hadn’t been dragged outside of himself, forced to interact with other people...

He remembered a day, not long after he had come out of the ice.  He had been standing in his kitchen when the fireworks started, window open to catch a warm summer breeze only to be startled by the series of cracks and pops, so like—too like—the weapons of the war he had left behind.  He hadn’t expected it, neither the sound nor his reaction to it. He hadn’t even  _ been  _ in the big battles; his were all smaller affairs.  He had really thought he had gotten by without the trained-in startle reflex that so many other soldiers of his generation had developed.  

He remembered, a little, how it had felt—and not remembering much beyond that was terrifying in itself, considering that usually his memory was perfect.  The whole incident had frightened him enough that he had actually told Dr. Chan about it. But the episode itself... 

He had been lost, he remembered.  Like the only thing he could think about was the sound of the guns, the rockets...  Everything else had faded behind the sound, and the fear. 

Steve was damned lucky that friendship—the development of ties to this world and a habit of engaging, combined with the idea that someone would miss him—had been enough to change his course.  A mild treatment, absolutely. He had had, in retrospect, the lightest possible case—and without care, it  _ still  _ would have eventually taken him down.

So maybe he  _ did  _ know some of what Jun was going through.  

“Come on...  Let’s get out of bed.”  He gave Jun’s should a final pat and then rolled him outward.  “I’m not great in the kitchen, but I can make eggs, if you want some.”

After breakfast, they moved to Tony’s living room.  Steve sat on the couch, and to his surprise, Jun curled up nearly on top of him, crawling half over his lap before turning and pressing his face to Steve’s chest.  He seemed to take comfort from the connection, rather than being disconcerted by it—as Steve was—and so, considering how much help Jun had seemed the to need the night before, Steve swallowed his discomfort and cautiously stroked Jun’s back. 

“You wanna talk about it?”

Jun’s head popped up again.  He squinted at Steve curiously, but didn’t comment on—the accent, Steve realized.  He had gone home, vocally, and hadn’t even realized. He patted Jun’s back, embarrassed.

Jun settled back down and started explaining.  He told Steve that he had dissociative episodes (“when suffering a large amount of anxiety”) and agoraphobia.  “The bathroom is my safe space, but even that wasn’t enough,” he explained. “I was filling the bath and I just...”  

He sighed.  Steve felt it against his chest.  He patted Jun’s back again, feeling helpless and angry about it.

Jun’s sigh turned into another, and then into a hiccup, which trailed off, once more, into muted sobs.  

Naturally, it was at that point that Tony burst in, wearing a rumpled suit and an expression of worry.

Jun raised his head, looking confused.  “I thought you were in Brussels,” he sniffled.

“Geneva, but who cares?  I ditched; the conference isn’t that important.   _ This _ is important.   _ You  _ are important.  Steve, what’s going on?”

“He’s crying,” Steve said.

Tony flicked him a scornful look.  “No,  _ really? _  Useless.  Jun, what’s going on?”

Jun’s sobs briefly grew louder before he struggled once again to master himself.  “You were... right...” he got out. “About Mark.” The hand he had been holding onto Steve with—the one that had been curled in Steve’s shirt—uncurled, and he hugged himself for a moment before reaching out, grabbing onto Tony instead.  He pulled, and for a moment they were all three pressed together, a trio of men, each one leaning on another.

Steve carefully lifted Jun, allowing Tony to slide into the in-between spot on the couch, an awkward balancing act of bodies that ended with Jun sprawling across Tony’s lap instead of Steve’s.  Steve shifted sideways, pressing the couch arm into his side to give them some space.

“I’m sorry,” Tony was saying, “I’m so sorry, Jun, that sucks—you deserve better, you...” 

He stopped, frowning, his eyes darting over Jun’s body.

“Are you wearing my pajamas?”

Jun also stopped, surprised enough by the question to end the flow of agonized words and glance down at himself, apparently for the first time.  “I woke up like this.”

They both looked at Steve.  

“He was soaked,” Steve said briefly.  “I thought—something warm and dry.”

A brief silence followed the explanation, as both of the other men tried to figure out how Steve had gotten Jun into the pajamas and came to the obvious, correct, conclusion.  

In the quiet, the sound of Steve’s phone ringing was loud and unmistakable.

Steve pulled it out but didn’t answer, looking instead at Tony and Jun.  “I have to go,” he said. He wasn’t moving, though.

Jun looked confused, hurt, but Tony nodded and waved a hand before returning it to Jun’s back.  “Go, go—weren’t you on call this week? Go... agent, or whatever you do... I’ve got this.”

Steve nodded and rose to his feet.  He turned, feeling heavy, and headed for the door.  

His bike was still at Jun’s house, and he didn’t have the keys for the borrowed Volvo: if he was getting called up, he would have to tell base to send him a uniform and a lift.   _ If  _ he was getting called up—but the number on his phone was unregistered, which almost certainly meant it was SHIELD.  

He paused at the doorway and looked back.

Tony had Jun half-sprawled in his lap, intimate and tactile in a way that Steve could never have been comfortable with.  He was patting Jun’s back, speaking in a low voice that, had Steve not had enhanced hearing, he would never have been able to understand.  As it was, Steve could make out the reassuring murmur: “You’re fine, you’re fine, you have friends, you have a place to go. I’m here for you, you—no, what?  Of course you can stay with me! I already have a room made up for you, it’s two doors down from mine. It’s the one with purple curtains. ...Well, I knew you like purple, so what did it matter if the walls were green?”

Steve’s throat clogged.  He couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t care one bit.

He remembered, vividly, teasing Tony about buying a house so they had more room to mess around.  He remembered Tony demurring, but not denying; remembered the way Tony hadn’t ever said clearly  _ what  _ his reasoning had been.  The bit about the increased business,  _ that  _ had clearly been a front, but it had seemed obvious that the real reason was Steve himself.

Except it hadn’t been.

Tony had declared that he needed a place near DC—and then had bought a place most of an hour away from DC, but only fifteen minutes from Jun’s house.  And he had made it a place large enough for two people to rattle around in without ever meeting each other if they didn’t want.  _ Steve  _ didn’t have a room here—or at least, he didn’t think he did, although now that he saw  _ this,  _ he wouldn’t bet on it.  But Jun had a room, and one furnished, by the sound of it, precisely to his taste and comfort.

Tony had seen this coming.  He had seen the moves that would be played on this chessboard  _ months  _ before they actually came.  Tony knew Jun—and knew Mark, too, Mark who apparently was an asshole, possibly even a cheating asshole if Steve was picking up the subtext correctly.  And Tony had known that, sooner or later, Jun would need a place to go.

So Tony had made one.

 

* * *

 

Steve had thought he was going to die, once.  He had sat in the chair in front of a control board that didn’t work anymore, watching the white sheets of Northern Atlantic ice get closer and closer, and he had  _ known  _ he was going to die.  

It hadn’t felt the way he had expected.  He would have guessed fear, or even regret, for his primary emotion when the time came, but it wasn’t like that.  He did feel those, of course—especially regret—but as the ice got closer and closer, the negative emotions had fled.  In his final moments, there was only one thing he had felt.

Peace.  Acceptance.   _ This is how it goes,  _ he had thought, and then  _ that’s okay, that’s a good way to do it.  About time, really. Better than pneumonia.   _

He remembered it now, standing in the doorway of Tony’s ridiculous expensive house. 

Steve had been getting through this thing with Tony—this ambiguous thing, this friends-with-benefits, no-commitments arrangement they had made—by building a sort of wall within himself.  The bricks were all the times before when he had been rejected, and the mortar was the knowledge of how much Tony didn’t want his feelings, and between the two...

“Wall” wasn’t quite the right word.  It was more like a dam—because dams had floods behind them.

But the flood was about to break through.  Steve felt it rising within him, as unstoppable and involuntary as goosebumps.  It was like a nausea of helpless affection, a love so strong it scorched his throat and made his chest ache.  His stomach clenched. His face twisted. 

_ This is how it goes...?  Okay, then. About time, really.   _

The same set of thoughts, all over again. Only this time, it wasn’t his body he was going to smash to bits on a sheet of ice.  

It was his heart.

Acceptance was loosening the tight muscles of his back, sending warmth curling around him.  He ached—he would probably always ache, in a hopeless sort of way—but that was alright. It was all okay.  There wasn’t any more fighting to do, here.

Standing there, ringing phone in his hand, he thought about breaking it off.  Thought about turning, and walking out, answering the call from work and then never speaking to Tony again.  It would certainly make things quick and clean, but still, the idea made him feel like vomiting. And not just because of all the feelings he couldn’t stave off any more, either:  Tony had worked his way into Steve’s life, his friends becoming Steve’s friends, his company one of the highlights of Steve’s week. Losing Tony as a lover would be bearable, but losing Tony as a friend?  Steve couldn’t stand the idea.

He would just have to endure.  Tony didn’t want to hear about Steve loving him; that had been made clear.  Fine, then. Tony wouldn’t hear a goddamn _ word. _  Steve could bottle it up—no reason to foist it on someone for whom it was so clearly unwelcome.

He could love Tony  in silence. It wouldn’t be the first time he had loved in silence.

He could endure.

 

* * *

 

Steve’s phone rang again, recalling him to reality.  He looked down at the screen, where the blocky writing read UNIDENTIFIED in ominous dark letters, and told himself he had to go.  He turned towards the door, but then hesitated one more time. “Jun.”

He had used his Captain America voice by mistake.  Both men looked up.

“Jun, it gets better.  When I met this guy...”  Steve jerked his chin at Tony.  “...well, I wasn’t great. I’m better, now.  He’s really... He’s here for you. It helps.”

Jun stared at Steve blanky for a long moment, blinking and saying nothing as Steve’s phone shrilled irritatingly.  Finally he ducked his head, eyes softening. Steve caught the faintest hint of a smile which flickered, just barely visible like a shy goldfish, at the corner of Jun’s lips.  “I know,” Jun said simply, but the emotion behind the words was heavy.

The world twisted around and turned upside down as Steve put several facts together.  He wasn’t the only one in love with Tony—Jun was, too. And had been, apparently, for a very long time.

Tony absolutely knew that, too, but it didn’t seem to matter.  He and Jun were still friends. 

Thank God.  That meant there was hope for Steve, after all.  

Steve shivered with the release of tension.  He let his eyes flick to Tony and before giving Jun a nod, and Jun gave it back, solemn.

Steve turned and left the room, answering the phone as he did so.  He didn’t look back.

 

* * *

 

The mission was as shit as its timing:  a neonazi cell in West Virginia called the “Fifth Army,” that the government couldn’t move against because it was just a little too public, leaving SHIELD to do their dirty work.  

It chafed.  Not that neonazis weren’t awful; the certainly were.  But they weren’t the big game Steve should have been hunting.

A year before Steve was... located... Nick Fury had come across a secret:  SHIELD had an infestation, a poison beneath its skin. SHIELD, he discovered, was full of HYDRA agents, the heart of a wider-reaching conspiracy that threatened every agency of their democracy, and further out over the world.  

But all Fury was able to find was two agents and a confession.  Not enough to go on. He had broadened his search.

By the time Steve was recovered, Fury had found over a thousand HYDRA agents, and estimated that it was no more than a tenth of the enemy’s total number.  Of those thousand, only eight hundred were within SHIELD. 

Fury was certain there were more.   _ That  _ was Steve’s mission.  

There might have been a connection between this Fifth Army group and HYDRA; after all, their goals were the same.  But other than that, it felt a lot like a distraction. 

Their intel said that the Fifth Army were hiding out in an old, used-up coal mine.  The place was chilly, and the air  _ smelled:   _ methane and mold, quite possibly the world’s least enjoyable combination.  Steve trailed his fingers along the side of the main shaft, and came away with soot coating the outside of his gloves.  Ugh.

The shaft moved sound oddly, muffling footsteps while voices echoed straight to each other’s ears.  Steve hadn’t been in the dark and twisting tunnel for more than ten minutes before he had no idea how close the rest of his team was—or even if they were still in here with him at all.

He clicked his radio, and heard nothing.  The rock was muffling the comms. 

“This is our best chance.”  

That was Rumlow’s voice, and as usual, he was wrong.  Steve rolled his eyes. Rumlow might be good in a fight—and he  _ was; _ Steve would have hated to be the bad guy facing off with him.  But honestly, Rumlow had made  _ so many  _ bad calls on missions that, if Steve weren’t Captain America, would have gotten Steve killed.

Steve had thought, back at the beginning of all this, that this team would be the death of him if he wasn’t careful.  

By now he was almost certain that  _ none  _ of the putative neonazis were in this damned mine, and even if they were, the skinhead assholes would probably hear them coming.  Especially if Rumlow kept  _ running his damned mouth.   _

Seriously, was Steve really the only one who could hear everyone else’s chatter?! 

Maybe he was...

“Set the explosives here, here—and then on the opposite side, staggered.  Yeah. That should bring the whole damned shaft down.”

Bringing the shaft down would mean bringing it down  _ on top of their team.   _ What the hell was  _ wrong  _ with Rumlow?!  

Steve was just opening his mouth to object when he heard another voice—Carmichael—ask, “Are you sure it’s enough to hold him?”

Him.

Not them.   _ Him.   _

Realization poured through him like hot lead, stunning as a breath of icy water:  Steve was the only member of the STRIKE team who had been sent to take down fictional neonazis.  Everyone else had been sent to take down  _ him. _

His entire STRIKE team was HYDRA.  No  _ wonder  _ they were dangerously incompetent; they weren’t really incompetent at all.  It was on purpose.  _ All  _ of the times they had nearly killed him:  on purpose.

And now they were done trying to make him think it was an accident.

Steve spun on his toes, three hundred sixty degrees, taking in everything he could.  If they were planting the explosives, then he didn’t have much time. 

The part of the tunnel he was in...  It was too close to the detonation. It would almost certainly be brought down completely.  And there was no chance of getting to the surface before the explosion, because he would have to pass the STRIKE team, and they would just shoot him.  They hadn’t before, but then, they'd had to worry about getting caught before. But there would be no need to worry about getting caught if they could just chuck his body back in the blast range, burying it under a mountain’s worth of rubble.

He couldn’t escape.  There wasn’t enough  _ time.  _

He ran, not up towards the surface but down, deeper into the tunnel, towards the lowest levels of the mine.  The weight of the earth around him would swallow the force of the explosion; hopefully,  _ hopefully,  _ it would be enough to survive the initial blast.  

He practically threw himself down the safety ladder, hurtled the corner and into the next level down of the main shaft, which zig-zagged into the earth like a switchback without the vista.  He pounded down and away, down and away... 

With a roar and a shuddering that shook his bones and made his stomach clench, the earth  _ moved. _

All the lights, strung on wires and suspended from the ceiling, went out, plunging the tunnel into darkness.  The noise was incredible, load as a hurricane in his ears, the walls of solid rock being twisted and bent into unrecognizability.  Dust filled the air, clogging his nose and mouth and making his eyes sting and close reflexively. 

Steve swore and ducked, not quite in time:  boulders smashed against his hips, back, and shoulders, one even slamming into his head.  Stars exploded across his vision and he swore again, unable to hear his own voice over the tumult.  By the time the movement had stopped and the dust had mostly settled, it was dark, and Steve’s head pounded where a boulder had slammed into him.  

It  _ ached.   _ His mind and eyelids were heavy, and stars exploded in his vision whenever he tried to focus too hard.

He closed his eyes and let the darkness drag him down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pleasedon'tkillme


	9. Chapter 9

Steve awoke with his head pounding.  His body ached too, a remnant of having been literally pummeled with rocks, but it was nothing on the pain in his head.  He was lucky it was dark. He remembered the migraines he used to get, and while this was clearly more related to a concussion, the scale of it was pretty close.

Also, he was trapped.

He could sense it from the air around him.  It wasn’t stale yet—wouldn’t be for some time—but it was too still, only the faintest trickle of movement against his face.  

He stretched out his arms.

Apparently, his plan to run deeper into the cavern had worked.  The tunnel had been narrow before, back when it was part of the mine instead of part of the cave-in.  It was still narrow, but about the same width. The floor was covered with rock—he hit two just spreading his arms—but when he crouched and stood, he was able to stand erect.  

He swept his hands upward, and discovered that the ceiling was jagged and irregular.  Clearly, large chunks of it had shattered and split off to produce the rubble below. It was still essentially a ceiling, though, and Steve took a moment to offer a heartfelt prayer of thanks.

Next, he pursed his lips and blew.  Nothing; his lips were too dry for a whistle.  He wet them with a heavy tongue and tried again.  

A low whistle echoed through the chamber.  He cut the sound off sharply and listened hard, then repeated the whistle.  He hadn’t done this in years—hadn’t been any good at it before the war, but he’d met a young blind man in Austria who could do it, and it had seemed too useful not to learn.  He left off the whistling and switched to clicks, swallowing twice before he could get enough moisture into his mouth to make the noises.

The tunnel was largely clear ahead of him, he decided.  Or at least for a long stretch. It wasn’t a perfect science, these clicks, and even if it were, Steve wouldn’t be the best at it.  But the sound bounced the way it would in a tunnel, not a cave in, and that would do for now.

He had been incredibly lucky; he had survived the blast.  Now he just had to survive everything else.

The air was largely still, but it was moving enough that he wasn’t worried about oxygen. He could go over a month without food.  Water was the big worry. Luckily, Steve was pretty sure he had a fix.

The mine had been built against a natural cave system, a federally protected landmark called Coon’s Mask Cavern.   Steve remembered that from the briefing. Thanks to an injunction based on that protected status, the main shaft of the mine ran right up against the wall of that cave, then turned and followed it deeper into the earth rather than going through it.  

God, he was thirsty.  But Coon’s Mask Cavern had a stream that ran right down its center; if he could just make it to that...  

Steve picked his way through the rubble until he was next to the wall.  He pressed his ear against the stone until he could hear the gurgles of distantly running water.

The sound was a damned torture.  He almost wished he didn’t have his enhanced senses, but...  No. They were worth it.

Steve sighed and turned, getting back to the middle of the tunnel, groping in front of his face to avoid low-hanging rocks.  He couldn’t go up. The mine’s main elevator was out of reach, blocked by hundreds of feet of potentially collapsed tunnels, with the armed STRIKE team waiting on the other side.  

But if he went deeper, he only had about five hundred yards til he was up against the wall of the cave.  Five hundred yards wouldn’t take long in the daylight, but here it would take him the better part of an hour—and that was assuming he didn’t get lost down one of the mine’s many turnings.  

Still, there was only one way forward.  

He started walking.

 

* * *

 

The natural wall of the cave was marked by the stone changing from granite to limestone.  As soon as Steve felt that open-grained roughness under his fingers he took his shield to it with abandon, battering at it until he was breaking through and splashing down into the sweet, mineral-laden water of the Coon’s Mask Cavern’s stream.

He pulled his helmet off and splashed water in his face, licking his lips and grimacing at the metallic tang.  

One problem solved; fantastic.  Only a _few_ more to go...

Navigating out of the cave wasn’t going to be the hard part.  Steve’s information said Coon’s Mask was a steep, narrow cave, the path through it almost vertical in places—and the walls were slick with moisture and biofilm, making them devilish to climb.  But the route to the surface was be simple, albeit twisty: there were no offshooting branches, no alternative tunnels down which he could get lost. As long as he was headed mostly up, he would be okay, at least as far as the public sections of the cave.

So that was getting out of the cavern.  Next step would be not getting shot on sight.  

Coon’s Mask’s entrance was only a couple miles from the mine’s, albeit on the other side of a mountain.  If Steve were running STRIKE— _Which I was!_ his mind screamed,  _STRIKE was supposed to be my team!—_ then he would certainly have stationed someone at the entrance to Coon’s Mask.  But STRIKE was under Rumlow’s command, and Rumlow had messed up on a similar scale before.  Of course, now, Rumlow’s incompetence was revealed to have been on purpose...

Steve wavered back and forth, unsure whether he could expect there to be eyes on Coon’s Mask or not.  In the end, he decided it didn’t matter: Coon’s Mask was the only path out, and he would have to take it.  

He scanned everywhere once he hit the public sections of the cave. The electric lights hanging from birthday cake-colored walls were a welcome relief after hours and hours of darkness.  No sign of Rumlow—or anyone else, for that matter.

It was only then that Steve thought to wonder how long he had been unconscious.  The trip to the surface had taken him about six hours; that would make it early evening, which would still have been visiting hours at the cave.  Where were the people? Unless Steve had been out for longer than he had thought.  He had guessed he had been unconscious for an hour, maybe two, but his time sense was nowhere near as good as his other gifts.

It was nighttime when he finally made it out of the cave.  But then, it was also November, so that wasn’t really much of a clue.

He found the road and oriented himself.  The mine would be two-point-one miles down the road to the left; he turned right and started jogging.  There were two towns nearby. Chouxterroire was about three miles past the mine, while Wilburn was seventeen in the opposite direction.  Steve needed food, and transport, and a change of clothes, and he needed all of them before he headed back towards STRIKE, so he had a long nighttime run ahead of him.

By the time he turned up at the mine again, it was daylight.  He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, with a solid leather jacket slung over it—exchanged for the emergency money he packed in his uniform kit—and he was driving an old green Ford truck (borrowed, of course).  In other words, perfect camouflage for the area.

He had thought about calling Fury.  He could tell him what was going on, what he had realized about STRIKE.  He could get reinforcements, and plenty of them, since the Triskellion was only a few hours away.  But he’d hesitated, for two reasons:

Almost a full day after the initial mine collapse, he had no idea how many, if any, STRIKE members would still be at the mine.

And he wasn’t sure he could trust the support Nick Fury would send.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust _Nick;_ he absolutely did.  He trusted Nick Fury in a way most of the spies they worked with would laugh themselves sick over.  But SHIELD was infested with HYDRA, and the betrayal of the STRIKE team meant that went higher and broader than any of them had thought.  He couldn’t risk it.

 

* * *

 

The mine's central tunnel was reached via elevator.  Other tunnels branched off the main one like fletchings off an arrow, making the mine a maze of blinds and false turns—which was one of the reasons Steve had been willing to believe there were people down there.  STRIKE would have taken the elevator back up to the surface, but they wouldn’t have destroyed the mechanism for the same reason that they wouldn’t just leave and assume the job was done: they would want to retrieve Steve’s body.

It was the only reason Steve could think of for “killing” him the way they had.  If they cared about intel, they would have held him—or tried to, at least—and if they didn’t need his body, they could have blown him to smithereens and then dropped him in the sea.  Instead, they had chosen a method which was deniable but overwhelming—even Steve would have had a hard time arguing with an entire mountain’s worth of rock—but which would leave his corpse intact.

They wanted his blood.  

Again.

So he was pretty sure as he approached that he knew what he would see.  The reconnoiter he took as he drove by confirmed his suspicions: STRIKE was still on site, and they had been joined by half a dozen fellows in heavy lifting equipment, a tent full of supplies, and some jerkoff in a suit.  

Eighteen.  Manageable.

Steve couldn’t risk stopping; that would have been suspicious behavior.  Instead he headed for Chouxterroire, the next town up the road. Just another local, out running errands...  Steve turned up the radio, pulled down his hat, and drove.

 

* * *

 

He came back to the mine on foot, stepping lightly to avoid crunching gravel under his boots.

The first HYDRA agent to fall was Carmichael.  Steve remembered Carmichael asking the day before if the mine collapse would be enough to hold him, and took him out with a single suckerpunch to the face.

Steve made his way to the supply tent, sneaking up to it from behind and listening at the rear wall before he entered.  There was nothing; no sounds, not even to Steve’s ears. He dropped flat and lifted the wall of the tent, then rolled himself under.  

A plethora of laptops and electronics awaited him.  He quickly set about copying information, backing up drives.  SHIELD analysts would do this too, of course, but SHIELD was full of HYDRA, and Steve wanted to do it himself.  

He had gotten through nearly half the computers in the tent before he heard the telltale crunch of boots over gravel.  Large boots, and then another pair, smaller; Rollins and damn near anyone else, then. Steve pressed himself into the blind corner of the tent and waited.  

He took Rollins first when he entered, snapping his neck before he could fight back.  If Rollins got a chance to get his feet under him, there would be noise, and the rest of the team would come to the ruckus.  

The other man proved to be one of the techs, a large, ruddy man, middle aged.  He wouldn’t have looked out of place on a construction site. He went down without a fight, and Steve duct-taped him well, supplementing the bonds with actual rope, before rolling him into the blind corner and finishing with the computers.

That was three.  Fifteen more.

The next two he took were both techs—average looking men who came into the tent and went straight to the computers without looking around.  Steve bound them and propped them next to the first, then took his looted drives and snuck out. He ran the half-mile to the F-150 fast enough to work up a sweat.  

He didn’t dare drive back to Chouxterroire.  Unlike Wilburn, Chouxterroire had a working post office, and it would be the work of half an hour to mail the drives to Fury.  But by the time he reached the mine again, Carmichael, Rollins, and the techs would certainly have been discovered. Instead, Steve stashed the drives in the truck and dashed back, hoping the backup copies would be enough, if they were needed at all.

He made it back just in time to see Rumlow heading towards the supply tent.  

Instead of slowing down to sneak, this time, Steve sped up, coming down from above and tackling Rumlow to the ground.  They rolled, flailing and striking at each other, through the tent’s opening and into the middle. Steve hit Rumlow in the face; Rumlow swept Steve’s feet out from under him.  Rumlow kicked Steve in the gut; Steve threw him through the table of computers, electronics cracking loudly as they slid to the ground. Steve finally had room to draw the shield, and did so, just in time:  Rumlow had drawn his gun.

But guns versus the shield was an old battle that had been fought many times before, and it wasn’t going to change now.  Steve charged forward, pinning Rumlow to the ground amid the shattered wreckage of the computers, and brought the shield down on top of him, again and again.  

He stopped, panting, just in time to the distinct sound of approaching panicked footsteps.  

Steve groaned mentally and shoved himself to his feet.  Rumlow had been the best of STRIKE, but even with Rollins and Carmichael gone, there were still eight more—plus four workers and the man in the suit.

Time to get to work.

 

* * *

 

Steve had a mandatory meeting with Dr. Chan the next week.  His STRIKE team had betrayed him, she said. She was adamant; she absolutely insisted.  

He didn’t resist much.

Once in her office, the weight of the usual silence was like an old, thick blanket around his shoulder.  He sat in the uncomfortable chair and watched her pen tap. It was sort of incredible to believe, but he had almost grown fond of the familiar annoyance.

“Tell me about the mission,” she began.

Steve waited twenty-nine taps and then opened his mouth.  “It was good, actually.”

“Oh?”

He nodded.  “Yeah.”

“In what sense?”

Steve took a deep breath and let it out, trying to ignore the shudder in his chest as he did so.  “SHIELD agents looked at those computers I found, and when the analyzed the data they found about two _thousand_ HYDRA the traitors,” he said.  “Hasn’t that been one of our goals?”

“It has,” Dr. Chan acknowledged.  “You’ve been working on finding HYDRA for a while, Steven.  How do you feel?”

“Relieved,” Steve said honestly, then added in an attempt to dissemble, “It’s good to know who I’m dealing with, you know?”

“That answer came very quickly...” Dr. Chan observed.  

_Only by comparison to the ones you have to pull out with dentist’s pliers._

“...Say some more about that.”

_I hated that fucking STRIKE team, and it’s good to know there’s a reason why._

He couldn’t say that.

“I’m a pretty honest guy,” he said instead.  “Not perfect—hell, my boyfriend—I mean, not _boyfriend,_ but...”  

He hesitated, scowling.  He had lost the thread.

“Tony Stark,” Dr. Chan supplied.

“Yeah.  Him. He still doesn’t know I'm Captain America.  He doesn’t even know Captain America is back! So it’s not like I _always_ tell the truth.  But, with STRIKE...  I worked with them every day.  We fought together, trained together...  They were supposed to be my brothers.”

They had been shitty fucking brothers.  If Steve hadn’t reached out and met Tony, he would have spiralled down into a cycle of despair, and not a one of the STRIKE team would have reached out a hand to help him.  

“And how does that betrayal feel?”

Tap.  Tap. Tap.  

Steve waited her out, this time.  He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

At the end of thirty seconds, Dr. Chan sighed.  She made it sound patient but disappointed, like a parent who has been let down by their kid.  Steve scowled.

“You mentioned concealing your identity from your boyfriend—”  She used the term even though Steve had explicitly rejected it.  “—as another example of a betrayal. Do you feel those two actions are equivalent?”

“No, of course not.”

“And why not?”

Her gaze was calm and black.  She blinked twice, slowly, as she waited for him to answer.  Her mouth was pursed, but that, Steve had come to know, was sort of a default expression for her.

He answered her honestly:  “Because Tony knows essentially what I am.”

Dr. Chan set down her pen.  “He knows you’re Captain America?”

“He knows I’m Steve Rogers!”  Steve heard the volume of his own voice and checked himself.  There was no need for shouting, as his mother would have said.  “He knows I’m a guy who served his country, and that I’m out of the military now.  He knows I was injured during my service and that when I woke up they told me I was lucky, and he knows that I _hated_ that.   _Still_ hate that.  

“He knows I like baseball but not football, knows I don’t go to church, knows I don’t want kids.  That I love my country passionately, but not blindly.

“And he knows that I work for SHIELD, and that there are more things about he doesn’t know.  And all of the things he _does_ know are true.”

Steve paused to test his words before speaking them.  “The people who work for HYDRA but _still call themselves my friends—_ those people are _scum._  Because HYDRA’s goals are fascism, slavery, and genocide, and I’ve made it clear that that cannot, and will not, be tolerated.”

Dr. Chan’s lips twitched, just at the corners.

After a second, she picked up her pen again.  

“So the difference between deception and betrayal... that’s a matter of scale, to you?”

Steve took a deep breath and sat back in the awful chair, suddenly done with all of this.  “We caught some of the HYDRA infiltrators,” he said, redirecting the conversation. “SHIELD got a lot of information on contacts and handlers out of this one, so Nick and Maria have had everyone they trust doing roundups.  It’s pretty satisfying, but it’s tricky. We have to strike quickly enough that no HYDRA agent can get the word out to any of the others.”

“I haven’t heard anything about this,” Dr. Chan said in surprise.  Her pen was lax in her fingers.

Steve snorted.  “Yeah, well... _You_ wouldn’t have, would you?”  

Her face went blank for all of one second, the slack expression making her, for once, look something other than tense.  Then she was up, the composition notebook dropping at her feet, hurtling towards the door.

Steve stopped her in her tracks with a fist in her stomach.  

He didn’t even have to hit her very hard.  He just held the fist out ready and she ran right into it, crashing into him like a car crumpling around a lamppost, his fist the immovable object with which her very stoppable self collided.

It was _deliciously_ satisfying.

He left Dr. Chan crumpled on the ground and knelt for the composition book, tucking it under his jacket before taking out his cell phone to let Maria Hill know of his success.

“It’s done.”

“Did she give up anything else?” Maria asked.  Of course she asked that; Maria Hill had a very fine analytical mind, and the whole point of having Steve do one last session had been to try to use it to backwards-extract more information.  Of course Maria would ask about it.

Steve coughed.  “No... No, she didn’t give me anything.  I, uh, may have gotten impatient and ended the session too soon...”  

But that wasn’t exactly true.  

Even in this last conversation, as brief as it was, he could see the pattern:  Dr. Chan was—had always been, right from the start— _intensely_ interested in Tony Stark.

It had always struck him as odd.  Tony Stark wasn’t her patient, so her fascination with him made little to no sense...  

But there was a possibility that would explain that, explain all of it.  A possibility that Steve deeply, fervently _did not_ want to face.

There was only one thing he wanted less than to find out that Tony was HYDRA, and that was to _not_ find out that Tony was working for HYDRA _until too late_.  So as bad as it was—as little as he wanted to think about it—Steve was going to have to investigate.

 

* * *

 

Norman Draper was one of the top ten divorce lawyers in the country.  

Norman’s little brother Alvin, on the other hand, was a deadbeat with a fixation on fast, not-particularly-legal bikes.  One fast below-the-table mod job later, Norman owed Tony a favor, and as a result Norman fast-tracked Jun’s divorce papers, filing on December 1st.  Tony declared it an early Christmas present and got out a bottle of champagne.

Jun didn’t move out of Tony’s mansion.  Jun didn’t feel safe at his own home anymore, for which Tony could hardly blame him, but also Tony hadn’t really wanted him to.  Eventually, once the SHIELD contracts were all well-established and Steve had gotten tired of Tony, Tony would move back to Malibu, and Jun could just have the house.  That was still a long way off, though. Hopefully, anyway.

Tony and Steve hadn’t been able to connect as much as he would have liked, lately.  Steve had had to leave on a mission right after rescuing Jun, and even once he had come back, he had been too busy to visit.  Not that Tony could talk: after ditching on the engineering conference for “personal reasons”, Tony had had to do a dozen public outreach things to convince the press et al that he didn’t have cancer or anything.  Such a pain in the ass. But it was done now.

Tony was home—well, home in DC, anyway—and Jun was out for the night when his phone rang.  The caller ID said it was Steve, so Tony had no hesitation in making his voice as licentious as possible when he answered.  “Hello, Steve. Want to come over tonight?”

“No.”

Tony stopped what he was doing to pull the phone away from his ear and stare at it.

Here was something Tony had found over the course of his life:  almost no one used the word “no” on its own. Mostly, in Tony’s experience at least, “no” was followed by some justification.  “No, Tony, you can’t use all the company funds to ‘buy Hawaii,’ it’s a _state,_ it’s not for _sale—”_ or, “No, you can’t have sex with someone who works for you, are you _kidding me?_ I don’t care if _Bill_ did it—”  

And so on.

Steve didn’t say it like that; he just... said it.  Apparently, he didn’t feel the need to bolster his no.  He felt it stood on its own. And that was bad, because if he didn’t explain the no, then how was Tony supposed to argue with him?  

So Tony asked:  “Why not?”

...Okay, and _maybe_ he was pouting a little.  He might have, just a little bit, missed Steve while he was gone.  It wasn’t the end of the world.

But then Steve laughed, bitter and harsh in his ear.  

Tony jumped; it wasn’t a very Steve sort of sound to make, that laugh.  It sounded like the kind of noise Steve would have made that first night, way back at the beginning of this, before Steve learned how to be happy again.  Before Steve figured out that friendship was an important part of his mental health. Bad sound. Tony didn’t like it.

There was a laptop lying tossed on the chair across from him, where Jun had put it before heading up to bed.  Tony grabbed it and opened it up.

Seconds later, he was looking at the readout from the tracking app he had put on Steve’s phone.  (Not intentionally! It was just something he put into every phone he hacked, along with half a dozen other apps that didn’t attract any attention to themselves until they were needed.  It had been more habit than anything, really!) But Steve’s phone was in his apartment on Dupont Circle—home, basically. So he hadn’t been, oh, sent halfway across the globe on another mission, or anything.  

Tony let himself breath again.  “What’s wrong?”

A soft, wet sound over the phone was his only answer.  Steve didn’t respond.

“Steve?”  

A groan.  Then—Tony’s heart squeezed in worry, but then settled down—a whump of a body hitting fabric and the complaining shriek of springs.  Steve had sat down on furniture, either his bed or the couch. A second noise, like the first but smaller, would be his head hitting, too:  the bed, then.

Tony took a moment to be grateful that Jun was out like a light upstairs.  Jun had enough anxiety without getting worked up by seeing _Tony_ worry.  “Steve, I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

A ragged breath.  “It’s complicated,” Steve said, and Tony jumped at the sound of his voice.  It almost never came out like that; someone had drilled into Steve at some early age that there was a proper way to speak, and by and large he used it.  But every once in a while, like when he had met Happy, he came over Brooklyn, and he was sure doing it now. _It’s_ _CAHMplicated:_ like he was straight out of one of those old radio serials.  

Steve took another wet breath.  Was he _crying?_ “Guess I wanted to tell you,” he mumbled, “seeing as I picked up the phone, and all.”

Tony put a hand to his chest, where his heart was pit-pattering along too fast.  He wished he hadn’t had anything to drink tonight. The room was already spinning too much.  What _was_ this?  What was wrong?  “So tell me.”

Steve was safe, he reminded himself.  Safe at his apartment. And also, safe in general:  one of the things Tony appreciated about Steve was his patient, pragmatic temperament.  Whatever this was, it couldn’t be that bad if Steve was lying in bed... but also, it couldn’t be nothing if Steve was fretting about it.  So which was it?

Another wet sound over the phone.  Was _Steve_ drinking?  Tony tried to remember what, if anything, he had ever seen Steve drink.  

Steve cleared his throat.  “You ever have a... a friend... who let you down?” he asked.

Tony’s heart froze in his chest before dropping.  It felt like it hit the floor and shattered. “What did I do?” he croaked.  His fingers were numb. Was that normal? Was there something wrong with him?  He hadn’t had _that_ much to drink!

“Not you.”  It came over the line in a mumble, but a quick one:  the truth. Tony focused on breathing. Not him was... it was a good thing.  A very good thing. Possibly more good than Tony really wanted to look at too closely, because that way lay madness and also a string of broken hearts, and half of those hearts had been Tony’s in spite of all reason.  But this: Not him. Good, good.

He would really, really hate to have let Steve down.

He breathed easier and focused in.  “Who was it?”

“A... a friend.  I can’t tell you...”

“Did he work for SHIELD?”  A guess, but probably a solid one:  Tony had never seen any of Steve’s friends, therefore they must be classified.  

There was a pause—surprise, maybe, that Tony had guessed.  “He, uh... He did actually, yeah.”

Aaaand bingo; Steve hadn’t expected Tony to put that together.  “I’m sorry. That sucks.”

Tony found himself drumming his fingers on his chest and shook them out.  He contemplated getting another drink.. He wasn’t _good_ at this, he didn’t know how to handle things like this.   _Emotions..._ ugh. He didn’t know how to comfort a guy that his friend had, what?  Messed up a mission? Fucked a goat, committed treason? There was a pretty wide range of possibilities, here...

“What happened?”

“Nothing recent.”  Steve’s voice was rough.  “It was years ago, I—my friend is _dead,_ it’s just I only just found _out_ about it—”  He was still all New Yawky, and it was disconcerting—like Tony was talking to someone else.  “—it’s _stupid_ to be so upset, but—”

“No, it’s not.”  Tony tried to offer counsel around the elephant sitting on his chest.  “No, no, someone lets you down, it’s normal to be sad—”

“I ain’t _sad.”_

The roughness of Steve’s voice was enough to flay your skin off with, and that was when Tony finally, _finally_ figured out what he was hearing.  “You’re pissed.”

“Hell _yeah,_ I’m goddamn pissed!  He—look, we didn’t _talk_ much, alright?  We fell out of contact, years ago—years before he died, even—but back when we knew each other, he was the smartest guy I knew.  Might’ve even been smarter than you.”

“Probably not,” Tony snorted automatically, then kicked himself.

But maybe it had helped.  Steve snorted back at him and then cleared his throat before continuing, his tone slightly lighter.  “Maybe not. Whatever, that’s not the _point._ Point is, he was really damned clever, alright, and he worked for SHIELD.”  

The timeline wasn’t lining up with some of the other things Steve had told him in the past, but Tony ignored that for now.  “So?”

“He was one of the _good guys,_ Tony.  He was—he was _so very American._ He loved this country, and he spent his life—his _whole_ life—- keeping it safe.”

“...Good?”

“And I just found out—it’s in the files, files we just uncovered after this last mission and we found a lot of...”  Steve breathed heavy into the phone for a second or two. “Tony, we found a lot of traitors.”

...When Tony had made a range from treason to goat fucking, he really had thought _both_ extremes were unrealistic.  

“And h—my friend, I mean, the one who—I can’t tell you his name...  He spent the last year of his life working for the enemy.”

“Shit.”

“And he may or may not have been killed for it.”

“Double shit.”

“I just...”  

Tony heard the pause as just that, and waited for Steve to finish.

“...How could he _do_ it, Tony?  How could he turn his back on everything he worked for, all his life?”

Tony sighed and set the laptop down on the floor, closing the lid gently.  “Any chance there’s a mistake? Could he have been... framed, or something?”  After a significant pause, he added, “Sorry, I don’t know any of the details...”

“No...”  Steve spoke slowly.  “No, actually, that _is_ a possibility.  Probability, even.  The files we found...  He had a handler. Somebody he trusted, somebody close, was yanking him around. So based on the files, he actually probably _didn’t_ know.   _Probably._  But the thing is, Tony...  I told you, this guy was _smart._ Back then...  He never would’ve played the patsy.  So sometime between when I knew him and when he died, he must’ve changed.  And I don’t know for sure _which_ change it was.”

Steve’s voice trailed off into a frustrated silence.  Tony let it go for a minute, not sure what he could say.  

Nothing could make this better.  He tried to imagine it had been one of his friends—Jun, say, or Darsh—but couldn’t do it.  Jun might, if he didn’t know that was what he was doing... but Jun was perpetually paranoid, and as many problems as that caused, Tony had to think it would have solved this one.  Darsh would never; he would have seen right through any so-called “handler” who tried it.

...Damn it, now _Tony_ was frustrated.  “Hey,” he said, “want to come over and get pounded until you can’t think any more?”

Steve laughed, loudly at first and then again, more softly.  “No,” he said. It was the same answer as the first time Tony had invited him over, but it came out differently.  Softer. Easier. More fond.

Tony smiled, relaxing.  “Your loss.” He let the affection in his tone to keep the mood in place.  

“You’re right, it is,” Steve said.  Then he added, just as Tony went to hang up, “Thanks—!”

Tony had the phone back at his ear in a second.  “What?”

“Just... for listening.  Thank you.”

“Oh.”  Tony blinked, swinging a foot idly back and forth.  He was smiling, he realized. Now why was that? “You’re welcome,” he said.  “Anytime.”

  



	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I adore you all, my sweet plum puddings. Your comments and kudoi are the Miracle Gro to the twisted weed which is my soul!
> 
> Confession time: I've had this chapter ready to go since the last one posted. I held it for a little bit because I hadn't started the NEXT one, chapter 11. And because it didn't feel fair to leave you with this cliffhanger for an unknown period of time... (I've started it now, it should be less than a month! *crosses fingers hopefully*) 
> 
> Thank you all, seriously. If you weren't commenting, I would probably not have the strength to write Chapter 11. It's going to be the hardest one, because it's based on some very personal things, and because that's the one where my Big Emo Reveal comes. So far, no one has guessed the Big Emo Reveal, which is the only reason I haven't already tagged it. I'll do that when I post chapter 11. 
> 
> Bless you.

A month passed.  A new year emerged from the wreckage of the previous one, and Steve dared to let himself hope.

The Howard Revelation still hurt Steve; he still worked at the idea like at a cheek sore from biting, prodding at it with a mental tongue late at night when he wasn’t sleeping.  How could Howard have let himself be fooled like that?  How much had the man changed over the years?

That wasn’t Steve’s only problem, either.  His nightmares were back up to their old frequency.  Before the mine mission—before the betrayal, and the explosion, and being buried under a mountain’s worth of rock—he had woken in a cold sweat no more than once a week.  That was a significant improvement over six months ago.  He hadn’t even noticed the reprieve until it was gone.  Now he had nightmares every other night, and sometimes more often than that.  He woke panicking, screaming himself out of dreams where the walls were mirrors and people were malfunctioning machines and everyone was wearing a mask.

He worked five days a week, with alternate weekends on call, but whenever he wasn’t on duty he spent the night at Tony’s house.  Jun was a convenient excuse—and Tony swore Jun _really was_ better when Steve was there, so that thin veneer of plausibility even somewhat held up.  But still, half the time Jun didn’t even come out of his room, and it was just Steve and Tony.

Steve tried not to treasure those nights too dearly, but it was a losing battle.  Steve was infatuated, and helpless in the face of it.  Because here was the thing about falling in love with Tony:  you couldn’t do it just once.  Tony’s soul, his personhood, was just too... _big._ Too omnipresent.  You couldn’t get away from it, and it only took a month for Steve to give up on trying.

It was there in the sly, turned up corners of Tony’s grin, in the crinkle at the corners of his eyes.  It was in the unruly curl and flop of his hair over his forehead.  It nestled at the trim, tucked-in waist, then swelled out into the round twitch of his bottom...  Over and over, Steve found himself looking.

A wry joke and a raised eyebrow, and Steve’s heart jumped right along with it.  A melodious voice joking into his ear, and all of sudden Steve had to be in private to answer the telephone.  

Tony’s _hands...!_ The hands were a goddamn _problem._  

One weekend, Steve was talking to Tony as Tony absently tuned up the Audi.  Tony easily held one part in place, some kind of two-inch piece of metal; then he reached in with the other hand, inserted a bolt, and popped the socket wrench down over that and tightened it up, all in a matter of seconds.  

Steve had to excuse himself from the shop.

He ducked through the doorway into the kitchen, flushing brilliantly as he went.  He turned on the water and splashed his face, then leaned on the edge of the sink and let it run.  The soothing nothing of the water, the cool of droplets dripping down his cheeks... they were helpfully tactile, literal touchstones.  He let himself feel them and breathed.

Breathed again.

“Think you’ll make it?”

When Steve looked up, Jun was standing in the doorway opposite the garage.  Steve would have seen him if he had been there before, so he must have entered while Steve’s back was turned.  

“Y’know, the water works better if you get it inside you.”  Jun reached for the nearest cupboard and took out a glass, then filled it with ice from the freezer.  He came to stand next to Steve, a short, self-contained presence as he filled up the glass at the sink.  Then he turned. “Here.”

He held up the glass closer to Steve—closer than they were pressed already.  His eyes were calm, opaque, as he held it there, waiting for Steve to take it from him.  Tony had bottled water in his refrigerator, but Steve accepted the glass.

It _did_ help, actually.  Steve licked his lips as he finished it and set the glass back on the counter.  “Thanks.”

Jun nodded.  “You didn’t answer my question.”

Steve ducked his head and smiled wryly.  “I’ll just have to make it, won’t I?”

“Not really.”  Jun tipped his head to the side.  “There have been lots of people who’ve fallen in love with Tony—for good reason.  You wouldn’t be the first to decide it was too much to deal with.”

Steve stared, flummoxed.  He covered with another sip of cool water, then set down the glass with a faint clink.   _“You_ didn’t.”

Sometimes Steve remembered that Jun was in love with Tony, too, and he thought, _poor guy._ The rest of the time, he wondered how it was that Jun didn’t hate him.  Right now was more the second one.

“It was different for me.”  Jun turned and hopped up on the counter, getting another couple of inches closer to looking Steve in the eye.  “Tony and I actually dated for a while.”

Steve wanted to protest, wanted to ask, _How is that any different?_ But he knew the answer:  he and Tony weren’t dating.  They weren’t _boyfriends,_ they weren’t anywhere _close_ to being a couple. It burned him, burned in his chest like pneumonia used to, sapped strength from his limbs like a fever.  He tried to forget it whenever he could, but here Jun was, putting his finger straight on top of it and pushing.  

Steve and Tony were friends, first and foremost.  And that was it.  The sex was just sex.

Except, for Steve, it wasn’t now.

Tony still didn’t know.  That was all that had saved him; if Tony knew, it would be over.  That would be the only thing worse than how it was now.

“You’ve never seen Tony date,” Jun said.  He was watching Steve’s face closely, monitoring his reactions like Steve was one of his experiments.  

“I’ve never...?  You’re right; I haven’t.”  Bitter as burned beets. “What’s it like?”

“S’a disaster.”  Jun rolled his eyes.  “You’d think a man as smart as that would be _just a little bit_ better with the people who are important to him.  You know why I broke up with him?”

Steve would never, not if he had his whole life to think about, never would have dreamed that Jun had been the one to leave Tony.  “Not a _clue.”_  

“He forgot my birthday.”

That was it?

“Not like you’re thinking.”  Jun tapped his fingers against the counter, a random pattern.    
“We were together for just over a year.  He forgot Valentine’s day, and then a month later he forgot our anniversary, so I started hinting.  And by hinting, I mean _saying._  Outright.  I made all the plans; I put them in his calendar; I even told Pepper, who was new back then but already incredibly efficient.”

Steve had met Pepper once.  She terrified him.  He nodded.

“Tony ditched on our night together—along with his entire day’s worth of business—to fly to Indianapolis and watch NASCAR.”

Old hurt still swam in Jun’s eyes, even all these years later.  Steve tried to imagine it, and couldn’t.  Not that he’d ever cared about his own birthday—and given it was a national holiday, he had always been able to spend it relaxing—but if he _had_ cared...  “That must have been awful.”  

Jun pressed his lips together and shook his head as if to clear it.  “I couldn’t take it anymore.  It wasn’t the one thing, it was the series, you know?  John—”

John was Dr. John Grosman, Jun’s therapist.  He was a patient eyed man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Einstein; Steve had met him when he came by Tony’s house for Jun’s sessions.  

“—John asked me what I would tell anyone else in the same situation, and then he told me I deserved at least that much respect.”  Jun blinked rapidly. “And I did! I still do.  So Tony isn’t—isn’t the one for me, no matter how much...”

Steve touched Jun’s shoulder, helplessly.  Jun’s head jerked up, and he flung his arms around Steve’s chest, drawing him in for a hug.  Steve let himself be drawn, patting uselessly at Jun’s back.

There were no tears.  It was close, but Jun managed, just barely, to hold onto them.  

Thank god; Steve could only barely handle crying at the best of times, and this wasn’t really that.

“I thought you should know,” Jun murmured at the end, his face still pressed to Steve’s chest so that it was like he was talking directly to Steve’s muscles.  “I thought you should be warned.  You can love Tony as much as you want, and it’s almost impossible not to.  But he’s never gonna love you back, not the way you deserve.”

“I deserve a hell of a lot less than most people think I do.”  

Jun didn’t laugh.  He pulled back, looked Steve seriously in the face.  “I thought that once, too.”

Steve couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just patted Jun gently on the arm again.

 

* * *

 

But by and large, Steve managed.  Jun knew, because Jun knew what it was like loving Tony, but no one else seemed to have figured out that Steve had fallen, and fallen hard.  Least of all Tony.

Then came the phone call.  Steve was just finishing up lunch when it came, his phone jangling out Tony’s ringtone cheerfully in the middle of the SHIELD mess.  No one looked up.  Since he was eating alone, Steve didn’t even have to excuse himself before fishing his phone out of his pocket and answering.  “Hello Tony.”

“Remember how a month ago you found out some bad news about your mystery friend?”

Steve instantly tensed.  What had Tony found out?  Did he know that Steve’s “friend” was Howard?  

Did he know Steve had been Captain America?

Steve said, “I remember,” and tried not to vibrate so hard the table rattled.

“And do you remember how I offered to take your mind off it?”

How he had...?

Steve’s brain went from _treasonous betrayals_ to something very different with no intermediate step and tripped over the gap.  Steve coughed, mentally face-planting directly into lust, and lowered his voice until it growled exactly as much as Tony would want it to.  “I remember you offering to pound me until I forgot about it.”

The phone was good: it transmitted Tony’s tiny moan perfectly.  “Yeah,” Tony said, “exactly.  Well, now it’s my turn.”

“Your turn?”

“I need it.”  Tony’s voice dropped half an octave.  “I need _you.”_

Steve caught his breath.  It wasn’t what he really wanted to hear—it wasn’t—- but it was _so_ close...  

He blinked away the sudden swell of emotion and cleared his throat as he stood.  He carried his tray to the dish window and dumped his trash. “I’m on my way.”

 

* * *

 

Happy opened the door with a long-suffering look.  “He’s upstairs.”

Steve ran for the steps.

He was still in uniform, was the crazy part.  Not the Captain America suit; that had been retired since they cut his still-frozen corpse out of it, and anyway Cap was strictly classified.  But the SHIELD uniform, dark blue with the stylized eagle on the sleeve: as far as Steve knew, Tony had never seen him in it before.  The SHIELD pants were bootcut to hide everybody’s side pieces, and thank God they had the extra gusset in the crotch to allow a wider range of movement, because Steve was taking these stairs three at a time.  

He was sweating.  He _had been_ sweating, ever since Tony had said he needed him.  The bike had been a terrible choice of vehicle for the drive over here; he might have been able to shatter speed limits on it, but his cock and balls had been swearing at him after the first five minutes.  Because _vibration._

He burst into Tony’s room.

Tony was already naked, kneeling up on a bed whose blankets had all been tossed to the floor.  He was hard, cock rising proudly towards his stomach, and he had a box in his hand, which Steve realized with a jolt was the control for a sex toy that buzzed just on the edge of hearing.  The curtains let in the noontime gloom of January, but that was the only illumination, and in the halflight, handprints glistened across Tony’s chest and thighs: lube tracks.

He was beautiful.  Steve caught his breath, and only barely managed to keep from blurting words Tony didn’t want to hear.

Tony turned off the toy and tossed the control box to the bed. “So here’s the thing.  I have had a very bad day, and I would like to forget it.” His mouth was glistening and pink, plumped with blood.  He must have been biting his lip while he worked the toy in. “I want you to fuck me.”

Steve breathed out heavy and hard, then sucked in another breath and nodded quickly. “I can do that.”

“Good.”  Tony reached behind himself and tugged.  “I need you to take off that... wow, that _extremely_ flattering uniform, ten points to SHIELD’s wardrobe department—and get behind me.  I want my face pressed into the mattress, I want your cock inside me—”

Steve groaned, ripping at the collar of his jacket, too flustered to handle the zipper.

“—and I want you to fuck me, hard, _inexorably,_ until I can’t even _drool_ anymore, much less think about how Obie has been _getting in my way—”_

Steve got his boots off faster than he ever had in his _life._  He didn’t even bother with the pants, just opened his belt and popped his flies as soon as he hit the mattress.  Tony was already turning, lining them up so that they faced the headboard.  Steve put one hand between Tony’s shoulder blades and shoved, gently.  

Steve caught hold of Tony’s cheeks, spreading them so he could see the hole.  The plug Tony had just dropped on the sheets was enormous; he must have spent the whole forty-five minutes Steve was driving getting himself prepped and open.  His hole was dark and puffy, glistening with the excess of lube.  Steve leaned forward and blew on it, watching as it twitched once, then relaxed again.

“Come on!” Tony snarled.  He pounded a fist into the mattress next to his head.  “Fuck—Steve, _do it!_ Don’t just look at it, _fuck_ my ass!”

Steve shuddered, wordless in sheer lust.  He was already hard, had been for far too long now, his balls purple with the strain.  He gripped himself and lined up.

The slide into Tony was amazing, hot and slick and tight.  Tony’s ass was well-stretched, but still gripped him firmly at the base when he had slid in all the way.  “Fuck,” Steve muttered. “Fuck.  _Tony.”_

The muscles of Tony’s shoulders rippled as Tony braced his forearms on the mattress on either side of his head.  His arms were bent, but tense all the way down, and when he spoke, his teeth were gritted. “Pound! Me!”

Steve drew back and drove in, hard, hands tight on Tony’s hips.  Once, then again.  He stopped there.

Tony howled in rage.

Steve caught him before he could move, pinning Tony’s hands in place just as Tony went to buck him off.  He kept his cock driven in deep, and in this position there was no way Tony could throw him.  He dropped his mouth to Tony’s shoulder, well below the collar line, and bit, hard.

Tony thrashed, trying in vain to twist away, but all he succeeded in doing was grinding his ass against Steve’s cock.  There almost wasn’t anywhere to go, but the mere millimeter of slide, combined with the way Tony clenched when Steve bit, was enough.  Tony collapsed to the bed, whimpering and swearing.

Steve let his mouth ease, no longer sucking and biting.  He licked at the dark mark he’d left, instead, then ground down against Tony’s ass.  “Beg me,” he demanded, voice dark.

They had played a game like this once before, back in September: Tony had tied Steve’s wrists to the headboard and worked him closer and closer to the edge with his mouth, only to stop and let him subside again until Steve had begged to his satisfaction.  They had done a lot of memorable things together over the last few months, but that one stood out, definitely one of the best.  Steve found himself wanting to give it back, wanting to use this opportunity to repay Tony in kind.

Tony collapsed against the bed, not fighting for the span of one second.  Two seconds.  Three—

Tony bucked, pushing _hard_ against the restraining prison of Steve’s hips, wrenching his arms where Steve had him pinned.  He got nowhere: a small jerk, delicious squeeze of pressure, but no true escape.

Steve grinned.  If Tony really wanted out, he knew perfectly damned well that all he had to do was say so.  This wasn’t fighting, this was _playing along._ “Ask nicely,” Steve crooned.

“I’m slicker than the Deep Water Horizon, how much _nicer_ do you want me to get?!”

Steve drew back and thrust in, sharply, once.  “I already told you: I want you to beg.”

Tony breathed out, harsh and shaky:  a laugh, badly hidden. “Yes, just like that, only do it more than once in a row—AH, son of a _BITCH!”_

Steve had bitten Tony’s left shoulder, the same exact distance from Tony’s spine as the mark he had left on the right.  

“Ah ha ha ha _no,_ ow—hey, don’t _stop,_ that wasn’t a _real_ no— _aahhh!”_ Tony twitched against him, hurting and obviously, so clearly, _loving it._ Steve gnawed and sucked, deepening the mark, then finally drew back with a final lick.  Tony whimpered, shuddering.

Steve raised his lips to just behind Tony’s ear, and whispered.  “Say. _Please.”_

Tony whined.

Steve pressed against him, pressed _deep,_ grinding the open edges of his pants against the underside of Tony’s ass.  He was still wearing his white undershirt, he realized.  He’d been in too big a hurry to take it off, and he wasn’t going to now, not when the technical fabric felt so good against skin.  He rubbed it against Tony’s back and waited.

“...Please...”  It came out high-pitched and quiet, barely a word at all.

Steve let his left hand release Tony’s wrist, sneaking under his chest and scraping his thumbnail against a nipple.  “Again.  Louder.”

Tony shuddered and tried to thrust, his now-free arm thrashing uselessly across the mattress.  “Please!” he said clearly, biting it off like he was angry.

Steve grinned again, fond, much too fond, and braced against the bed.  

Fifteen strokes he allowed himself.  Fourteen of them were just as hard, just as fast as he wanted them to be, deep and punishing, _delicious._ Tony shouted and thrust to meet him as much as he could, obvious and loving it.   _God,_ he was glorious like this!  

But on the fifteenth stroke Steve slowed, panting, to a stop.

“NOOO!”  Tony curled his left hand into a fist and beat it against the mattress.  “WHY?!”

Steve leaned forward and licked up the full length of Tony’s neck, biting his earlobe gently at the end of the stroke.  He was panting, deliriously happy, giddy with the power Tony was granting him. “Because...” He grinned as Tony squirmed at the hot breath on his ear.  “...you stopped asking nicely.”

Tony tensed and made another abortive thrust, but it got him nowhere.  “What, you want...  Nnnnn!  ...You want me to just keep begging?  Babbling like a—damnit!—moron?”  But Tony was panting too, now, worked up beneath Steve, squeezing tighter and tighter around his cock.

Steve grinned and licked Tony’s neck again.  “Sounds _great.”_

They both waited a second.  Tony didn’t say anything, and Steve didn’t move.

“...Fuck,” Tony said—the sweet, sweet sound of him giving up.  “Fuck, Steve....  Ohhhh, God, _fine.  Please...!”_

Steve started up again, and this time, it was all the way perfect.  Tony kept talking, pleading—shouting, soon, cries falling from his lips like prayers, and often with actual prayers mixed in.  

Tony was beautiful like this, limp beneath Steve, abandoned.  His eyelashes, when his head tilted far enough that Steve could see them, were fluttering, almost like he was dreaming.  His back had a sweet little curve, ass arching up to meet Steve like something out of Renaissance painting.  The Golden ratio, it was called.  Beautiful.

Steve pounded home again and again, fast and deep, dragging his cock against Tony’s prostate.  Tony yelped and cried sweetly beneath him, gloriously out of his mind.

Steve lost track, a little.  Not too bad.  It was just, he was focused on Tony, was all.  Only on Tony, pounding home as long as those exquisite pleas were falling from Tony’s lips, and in his focus, he, uh... forgot.  About the part where he was supposed to be coming, too.

Tony tensed, and shook, and shot, and Steve was still nowhere even close to coming.

Steve stopped after that, of course.  He wasn’t an asshole—no pun intended.  Tony had to be way too sensitive right now to keep going.  So Steve came to a stop with his cock still buried deep; he wrapped his arms around Tony’s chest and clutched, trying to hold himself unmoving.  His chest heaved against Tony’s back as he gasped, and he pressed his lips to Tony’s neck in a loose, open-mouthed kiss.

Impossible not to linger in that kiss; impossible to keep from drifting his mouth over Tony’s skin, tasting, _tasting..._

Tony groaned his name.  “I hate you.  God.  Fuck.  I love you.”

Steve’s heart stopped, then started again.  It had been an exaggeration, the same as everything else.  Tony didn’t hate him, either, after all.

“You are _so fucking good_ at that, and you feel _so damn good,_ Christ I can _still_ feel you—”  

Steve knew the exact moment when Tony realized the state he was in.  

“You still haven’t come?  Then why did you stop?  You were close, right, it would only  have been a few more strokes—”

“Not really.”  Steve pressed one last kiss against Tony’s neck, then sighed and propped himself up on his arms.  “It wasn’t exactly just around the corner.  Figured I was better off stopping rather than fucking you raw.”

Tony tensed, and his breath caught in a good way.  “Do it,” he said. “Start slow, but... I want that.  Fuck me through the aftershocks, make it slow but endless.  Make me _fee-hee-heeel—!”_

Steve had taken Tony at his word.  He pulled out, slow, dragging, shifting his hips to make sure his cock rubbed Tony’s prostate the whole way out, and then the whole way back in, slow like honey dripping off of a spoon, or like lava oozing out of the black cracks beneath the sea.  Like a locomotive just starting the hiss and pound of its engine, he let his hips piston, out and in and back out, again.

“Is it too much?”  Steve gasped the question into Tony’s neck, making mark after mark on the dusky olive skin there.  “Can you take it?”

Tony moaned beneath him, hands scrabbling at the sheets beneath them, and didn’t answer.  His head thrashed, but his hips arched back, meeting thrust after slow, decadent thrust.

“Tony?  Tony, I need you to answer.  Is it okay?  Is it too much?”  

Just before Steve would have given up and stopped again, Tony gasped out an answer:  “It’s good! I can take it, I—I love it, oh god, it’s so good—I hate it, I love it, Steve, more—”

“What about the speed?  Is it slow enough?  I don’t want you to—”

“Faster.”

“Faster?”

“Faster!  Oh, god, Steve, _yes_ —I’ll beg again, beg for you, please—”  

“Shhhh.”  Steve dropped his chest to press him against Tony, sliding a little from the slickness of his shirt against Tony’s sweat-soaked skin.  He wormed his hands forward until they overtook Tony’s and twined their fingers together, nestling their hands close, as close as they could get.  _Two become one._  

He wished he could get a picture; they probably made quite a sight.  

“Shhh, Tony, I’ve got you.  I get it.  I’m here.  You ready?”

“Yes!”  It came out on a shout.  “Yes, Steve, please—!”

“Okay...”

It was the same pace as before, the one Tony had demanded he set in the first place:  the punishing pace, the ruthless one.  Fast and hard, just as before, and yet completely different.  Steve could feel it, swelling in his chest; a tenderness in the way his fingers twined with Tony’s, in the slack press of his mouth against Tony’s dark-marked neck.  Their hips worked together like a horse at stud, but their heartbeats synced like lovers’.

Tony talked him through it, desperate and yet still too gentle.  “Come on, Steve...  Come on, baby.  Take me, take me, come on...  Deep like that, just like that, God, you’re so good to me Steve...  So good to me.  Just do it, fuck, yes, Steve—work me, use me, come on...”

Steve blinked tears from his eyes.  

This wasn’t what it had been like in the beginning.  He wasn’t sure if Tony knew it or not; with his back to him, Tony wouldn’t be able to see the look on Steve’s face.  But _Steve_ knew:  somewhere, in all the hot, sliding passion they were letting loose, he had slipped.  

This wasn’t fucking, now.  This was lovemaking.  Steve’s hips were moving in the same sharp, confident pulses as before, but his heart was in his hands and his lip, and those were touching Tony gently, with all the reverence Steve tried to keep hidden.  

Steve felt tears in his eyes, gasps in his chest.  This was a betrayal, too precious for what they were supposed to have.  If Tony knew...  If Tony knew, he would end it.  This wasn’t what Tony had asked for, this wasn’t what was allowed.  This was a treason.

Steve treasured it anyway.

 

* * *

 

They fell asleep afterward, both of them drifting off after Steve tipped them to the side and pulled out.  He woke before Tony did, for once not from a nightmare, possibly because it was still so early: it wasn’t yet six in the evening, by his watch.  Already dark out, though.  Three cheers for January.

He propped himself up in the darkened room, waiting for his eyes to adjust.  They hadn’t ever turned the lights on, he remembered.  The indirect light from the windows had been plenty earlier, though of course it was barely anything now.  Still, the faint hint of moonlight was enough to make out Tony, still sleeping soundly beside him.

Tony’s lashes were really absurdly long.  They looked almost feminine, but then of course there were the lips to cancel that out.  And the chin; not a lot of ladies with a chin like that.  The nose was clever and straight, but just long enough to have a hint of a point.  The mouth was clever, too, but only when Tony was awake; like this, it just looked vulnerable.

The moonlight was flattering, but Steve liked it better when he could make out Tony’s laugh lines.  He liked the laughs themselves, too.  Liked the animation of Tony’s face when he was awake and poking at things, figuring out how to make them better.  

Steve felt the infatuated smile curling itself onto his face again, and let it.  He had some time yet before Tony would wake up; until then, he could bask.

 

* * *

 

He declined to stay the night, citing all the paperwork he had put off to come over here, instead. “Files,” he reminded Tony.  “Incredibly boring, but sadly important files.  I know you understand.”

“Understand yes, approve of no.  What do you want on your pizza?”

“Nothing, because I’m going home.”  Steve looked around for his boots and, locating them, sat down on the edge of the bed to put them on.  He was still wearing his pants, unbuttoned and sagging around his hips.  He had never taken them off before the sex, and afterwards he hadn’t wanted to disturb Tony.

Tony blinked sleepily over at him with diffuse moonlight glinting off his chest, a blanket-wrapped temptation.  “Yeah, but at least after pizza—”

“No, Tony—”

“Are you a plain pepperoni kind of guy?  I have to admit, I’m a sucker for black olives, but I can get my own pie, that’s nothing complicated—”

“No, Tony!”  Steve finished knotting his laces and looked around for his jacket.  

Tony stopped arguing.  He frowned, really looking at Steve for the first time since they had woken up together.  “You’re really going?  Why?  What’s wrong?”

And of course he would know that much, wouldn’t he?  He was Tony Stark, the smartest man in the world.  How long had Steve thought he could fool him?  Steve blinked hard and shook his head, standing again.  His jacket was across the room, caught on the edge of the full-sized mirror that hung from the back of the walk-in closet’s door.  “We’re friends, right?”

Tony snorted, nonplussed, and looked pointedly down at his form.  Even with the blankets in the way, his point was obvious.

Steve groaned.  God forbid this be easy.  He flicked on the light and came back to sit on the edge of the bed, facing Tony.  

Tony frowned and backed up, sitting up against the headboard instead of the easy sprawl in the middle of the bed he had been using.  “What’s wrong?” he repeated.  His voice was tense.  There was fear in his eyes, now.

Steve cringed inside, and closed his eyes to hide it.  “What I mean is... this started as sex, right?  And then it went to friends with benefits.”

“Yes...”

“And now we’re _good_ friends.  I think, anyway.  Right?” Steve smiled hopefully up at Tony while twisting his hands in his lap.

What if Tony didn’t agree?  What if Tony thought they were still just a hookup?

What if Tony kicked him out after this?  It was distressingly possible.  Steve had broken the rules, after all, even if Tony hadn’t said it was a rule as such.  He hadn’t needed to; Steve had known anyway.   _No falling in love,_ but then what had Steve turned around and done?

“Good friends,” Tony repeated.  “Sure.  I mean, yes! Definitely.  Good friends.  You don’t need a place to stay, do you?  I have a spare room—”

“I don’t need a place to stay.”  

Steve looked down at his hands.  They were still pretty close to perfect, fine blond hairs dusting skin that was soft and resilient despite the dry, cold air of winter.  Summer hands, but his fingers were cold right now.  He rubbed them together to warm them.

“What I _do_ need is your friendship in my life.  I’m happier around you, Tony.” Steve smiled up at Tony, then let his gaze fall again.  “I’m so much better than I was when this began.  I have... _hope,_ for once.  Feel like I might be walking a path, instead of wandering around aimlessly.  You’re good for me.

“And I think I’m good for you, too.  I think I help.  Don’t I?”

The last two words came out plaintive, almost begging.  Tony answered hurriedly. “You _do_ help, Steve.  You help me, you help Jun—hell, you help Pepper, who hasn’t had this easy a time getting me to agree to meetings in years!  Everything is easier with you in the picture!”

Tony was almost pleading now, too.  He must think Steve was saying goodbye.  Steve remembered Jun saying that there had been plenty of people who did, and something ugly curled up like an ember behind his sternum.  That wasn’t going to be him; not ever.

He coughed.  “I don’t want to go,” he started.

“So don’t.  Stay.”

“I don’t want to go, but if I stay...”

Tony leaned forward.  

Steve didn’t want to say it.  He _didn’t._

But he had to.  

He raised his head and miserably met Tony’s eyes.  

“...I think we need to stop having sex.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My god, you are the most wonderful readers on the planet! I love you all!!!
> 
> No cliffhanger this time. Also, Steve confesses his feelings and he and Tony have a Talk! That's got to end well, right? :D :D :D

“WHY?!”

Tony’s voice cracked loud in the quiet bedroom— _too_ loud.  Too obvious.  It ripped out of him fast and still raw in the center.  

Steve shrugged and avoided Tony’s eyes.  “What did you call this, again...?  No-stress booty-calls?  I... don’t want that, anymore.”

Tony scowled.  His limbs still had sticky patches where the lube had dried; his ass still ached from the epic pounding he’d received.  Steve’s mouth had left hickies on his shoulders, bruises he would feel for the next week, and Steve’s hands had left matching marks on his hips.  It had been a glorious fuck, deep and hard and perfect, especially at the end when Tony had been out of his mind with overstimulation and the grounding pressure of Steve’s hands twining with his own.  

And yet something, somewhere in there, had turned Steve off so badly that he never wanted to do this again.  

So, yeah:  ouch.

Steve must have seen the look on his face, because he jumped a little and started talking faster.  “No, it’s not—not what you think! It’s not... I don’t mean I don’t want _you...”_

“Right; of course not.”  

_Got enough sarcasm there, Stark?_

Steve opened his mouth and then shut it again.  He licked his lips and started over with a deep, bracing sort of breath.  “I don’t think you—I mean. What I’m trying to say is... I’m in love with you.”

Tony’s eyes felt huge; he probably looked about as gobsmacked as he actually _was._ “Ah,” he said.  

“And you don’t want me to be,” Steve added.

Well, _no,_ actually.  He didn’t.  But that wasn’t—  He didn’t—

“Ah,” he said again, no more smoothly than before.  He tried moving his mouth worked a few more times, but nothing any closer to words came out.   _Good job, Stark.  Nailing it!_

Steve watched him flounder in silence for a moment, then smiled sadly.  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what I thought.”

He got to his feet.

Tony jerked into action, reaching futilely for Steve’s out of reach jacket sleeve.  “Steve—! Don’t go. Just... wait. You...”

Steve waited.

Tony tried to tell Steve he was wrong, that Tony could be the missing he wanted...  Anything to make Steve stay, right?  But...

He couldn’t do it.  He’d been down this path too many times before; all that was waiting at the end of it was pain.

He cleared his throat.  “...You’re right, okay?”  

He hated this.  He _hated_ this.  He was going to lose Steve, damn it.  Just the way he’d lost all the others...  “I’m sorry. That’s—I’d love to what that.  I’d love to be the guy you deserve, but... That’s not my scene.  I can’t do it.”

He’d sure as hell _tried_ often enough.  

“I figured.”  Steve wasn’t looking at him now.  He was watching their reflections in the mirror, instead.  Not much of a difference, but enough that Tony didn’t have to look him in the eyes during this mess.

Tony wished, desperately, that he weren’t having this conversation naked, sitting up in bed without even underwear on.  Steve had been getting ready to go, and Tony should have just let him. It would have hurt, but not as much as this.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled again.  “I wish I could...  But I can’t.  No. That’s a—that’s a hard no, there.”  He swiped his hand over his mouth.  His lips felt shaky, for some reason.  Like he was about fifteen seconds from vomiting.

“I figured,” Steve repeated.  

“Everyone I love _leaves_ me,” Tony blurted, and then immediately wished he could cram the words back inside.  “I mean, I—relationships! I can’t do them. It works out—no. It works out no.”

 _Oh_ brilliant, _Stark.  Good job with the English there.  Next you wanna try pointing at yourself and maybe calling Steve Jane?_

But Steve just nodded, as if that response had been expected.  “That’s what Jun said.”

Tony flinched.  “You talked to Jun?”

It smarted like a slap, in one sharp burst followed by a longer, more lingering sting.  He had thought, after all this time, Jun must have forgiven him...  Apparently not.

Jun was an old hurt, well worn down by time.  Even a smooth river stone could hurt when somebody threw it at your head, though.  He and Tony had dated more than a decade ago—Tony had been twenty-three, Jun only a couple of years older—and for a while, it had been brilliant.  Jun was hot, eager, and attentive.  He had doted on Tony, watching him with an almost worshipful gaze, and he had positively _bloomed_ whenever Tony gave him even the simplest of compliments—all of which he had deserved.  He was also kind, brilliant, and inventive, but even still, even with _all of that,_ Tony had been too much of a gaping black energy void for Jun to stay with him.

They had remained friends, after.  There was that, at least, one tiny bit of comfort in the face of the pain and humiliation.  Jun was much happier now that Tony was just his friend—which was about as close as an atheist like Tony could ever come to grace.

“Sure,” Steve said.  He shrugged jerkily, still not looking at Tony.  “He caught me in the kitchen one day, wanted to help me out.”

“Ah.  Well...  Good luck.  Really—good luck, best of luck, hundred percent, but I have learned that I can’t—I’m not... good... at love, Steve.  I—I hurt people. People I care about.”

Steve nodded again, a jerky up and down bob of his head. “People like Jun.”

“People like _you,”_ Tony corrected.  He sat up a bit more against the headboard, pulling the blanket up around his waist as he went.  He really wished he were wearing a shirt. “There’s a word for it, actually.  If you want to google.  Maybe it’ll be... easier, somehow.  Aro, is the word.  Aromantic.”

He was babbling.  

Steve was looking at him now—finally—but his face wasn’t giving anything away.  “Aromantic.”  Steve repeated it slowly, as if he were figuring out the roots by breaking it into pieces.  Two pieces; not hard math, there.

Tony nodded a confirmation, anyway.  “It means... Well, means me, basically.  More or less.  Someone who doesn’t... who isn’t interested in romance.  Who would just as soon... not.”

Steve said nothing.  

Tony babbled to fill the gap, knowing that was what he was doing and hating it, but not quite able to stop.  “It was a relief, actually.  Finding out there was a word.  We use words to generalize; no need to generalize if there’s only one of a thing, so the word...  That meant there were more of us.  More people like me.”

It had meant he wasn’t completely broken—just different.  That the disasters which had been his relationships—and there had been many—hadn’t been all his fault.  Jun, yes; Rumiko, too, and Ty, way back in the day.  Sunset.  Pepper.  Others.

Tony had fallen in love over and over again.  He loved easily, his heart not so much on his sleeve as on a jack-in-the-box, ready to spring out towards someone at a moment’s notice.  But it had never been enough.  Over and over again, his relationships had fizzled, and consensus was pretty unanimous it had mostly been Tony’s fault.   “You need to try harder,” they would say after he had tried his best, or “you don’t listen to me.”  And, most often of all:  “You just don’t care enough.”  

Over and over and _over._ Wasn’t hard to spot the common denominator, there.

Tony had given up on love over a decade ago, and that had proved to be an excellent life decision.  But it wasn’t until a couple years ago that late-night googling found him the word to describe _why._

 _Not.  Broken._ More than one standard deviation, but hardly an outlier; not enough for anyone, but also not trying to be.  Not anymore.

Aromantic.  

The first time he’d called himself aro, it had been terrifying.  Now it just felt like solid ground beneath his feet.

Steve was nodding as if he understood.  Tony _prayed_ he understood...  “I know what that’s like,” Steve offered.  “The word thing, I mean. When I was younger...”  He paused and took a deep breath. “Everyone I knew thought gays were wrong.  Queer, they called them—and they meant, strange.  Wrong.  When I came here, and being queer was just another way to be a _person..._  Well, some people still care, but mostly it’s normal, or almost normal, and that’s...  Okay.” He moved his hand, setting it on Tony’s shoulder, an almost avuncular motion except that from Steve it seemed natural.  Brotherly.  Bracing.

Steve squeezed comfortingly.  “You’re okay,” he said.

Tony breathed out a sigh of relief and leaned into the touch.  Finally, _finally,_ Steve was back, listening and engaged and—at least from what Tony could see on the surface—not breaking into pieces inside.  There were cracks there, but they were all done splitting; the rest of the conversation could be glue, piecing Steve back together again.  

Thank _fuck._

“Is that why you stick to—you said you had a list?  Of people like me, I mean. Other fuckbuddies?”

Tony laughed, a sharp burst, surprised out of him.  Steve wasn’t a prude—obviously; Tony’s ass was still a little too deliciously achey for that.  But he still tended to avoid swearing when he wasn’t upset.  Tony definitely hadn’t expected the word _fuckbuddies_ to fall from his lips.  “I had a list, yeah. It’s out of date; I’d fallen into a rut without even realizing it, before you came along.  There were also a lot of one-offs...  Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  People expect that from me.  They’re not let down when I just play into their expectations.”

“That’s what you were inviting me to, that first time,” Steve realized.  “You figured you’d, uh... ride the ride... and then move on?”

“It was a _really_ great ride.”  Tony leered, hoping to sidetrack Steve with humor.

“Thank you.  But... that’s not what happened.  I was different; you kept me around.”

“You’re charming.  I was charmed.  Sue me.”

“No, thank you.”  No matter how hard Tony tried, Steve wasn’t falling for the distraction.  “Tony, is that really it?  That’s all you—I mean, you don’t want love at _all?”_

Tony’s chest felt tight, and it wasn’t from his heart.  Fuck psychosomatic pain, really.  He squeezed his eyes closed before breathing and starting again.  “Try this: A date.”

“Yes, please.”

“No—imaginary date.”  Tony stopped, narrowing his gaze in mock suspicion.  “Nice try.”

Steve grinned, a quick flash of humor.  Welcome, no matter how fast it vanished again.  “Worth a shot.”

Tony smiled, even as he rolled his eyes.   _“Imaginary_ date.  Someone you like—could be me, could be not, whatever—picks you up.  You’re dressed up, they’re dressed up, you go out to dinner. Somewhere nice, somewhere with candles on the table and soft music and food you can’t pronounce but it tastes delicious.  Got it?”

“Sure.”

“And then, at the end of the date, your date—whoever that is—”

“I made it you,” Steve said dryly, “just to be contrary.”

“You would,” Tony huffed.  “So your date—me— _I_ reach across the table and take your hand...  Like this...”

Steve’s fingers were strong, his palm warm and calloused.  Taking his hand had been a mistake, just like the rest of this, because now Tony didn’t want to let go.

“...and I say, ‘I love you.’”  

Steve’s eyes were blue, full of something that burned too hot to touch, and Tony couldn’t look away.  It hurt, it hurt so much, his chest was _aching,_ but he could.  Not. Look. Away.  

“I love you,” he repeated helplessly, and oh, _fuck._  He wasn’t talking about the date anymore, and Steve knew it—but it was still _true._  Real life, right now, he loved Steve, loved him from the bottom of his rotten, no good soul.  Had for a while now.

And it wasn’t enough.  It was never enough, never _had been_ enough, not for anybody.  

How many times could Tony make the same damned mistake?

Not this time.  Not with Steve.  Steve was a good man.  He deserved better.

Steve blinked, thank god, twice rapidly, and then a third time.  On the last one his eyes stayed closed for a long, painful moment, and Tony got to just look for a second in privacy.  

Steve’s eyelids were thin, one of the few parts of him that was delicate.  His lashes were absurdly long.  His lips were parted, and in the breathlessness of that moment looked soft.  They weren’t, Tony knew—they were strong lips, firm.  Lips that took what they wanted, but gave as much as they took.  Tony wanted, quite desperately, to kiss them, but that was gone now.  He would never get to kiss Steve again, most likely.  

His face was still, or—no, not still; _motionless._ Poised.  Waiting.  But no matter what he was waiting for, Tony wasn’t going to be able to give it.  Tony was... lacking, in some crucial way.  That was the whole problem, here.

Steve opened his eyes again.

“I love you, too,” he husked.  

He wasn’t roleplaying the date, either.  Tony’s chest squeezed again.

Steve was for real.  He really loved Tony.  

Steve’s hand was tight around Tony’s, but Tony couldn’t quite bring himself to pull his arm back.  “How do you feel?” he asked, then quickly course corrected.  “On your date, I mean. Imaginary date.  When I tell you—when that happens, I mean.  How would you feel?”

Steve shuddered, just a little.  Tony mostly knew about it because he felt it through their clasped hands.  “I’d be happy,” Steve rasped. “Oh, God, _Tony._ I’d be so happy.”  He blinked again, twice, hard.

“Would you?”  Tony had to concentrate to pull his hand back.  He clenched it into a fist and knuckled it into the mattress beside his hip.  “Because if were me on that date, hand holding, my date leans across and says that...  If it were me, I’d feel trapped.”

Steve froze.  

The misty fantasy that Tony had conjured up around them was gone, now, banished by too much truth.  “Trapped,” Steve repeated carefully.

“Sure.  Situation like that...  The date, the fancy restaurant, even the hand-holding...  It all screams ‘set up.’  I wouldn’t feel loved; I’d feel paranoid.  Steel jaws, closing in.” He gestured with both hands, showing the trap closing shut around him the way it always had, the way it always would.  No one’s fault; that was just how people were.  “You give me a bunch of nice stuff, I don’t expect more nice stuff; I look for the other shoe to drop.  Always have.”

Steve’s body jerked at the last sentence, almost like he’d been shot.  “Always have,” he repeated.  His gaze sharpened, focused in.  This must be what he looked like on the job.  “Really?” he asked. “Always?”

Tony thought about the time Ty had taken him for a picnic out behind the polo course, back at boarding school.  Tony had talked about his physics final, and Ty had talked about... Tony.  After twenty minutes, Tony had been ready to run screaming all the way back to the dorms if it meant not finding out what Ty was buttering him up for.  He was pretty sure he’d been thirteen when that one went down.  “Long as I can remember.”

Steve turned his head away.  “Damn,” he said softly.

Steve was sitting on the edge of the bed, still, but now he straightened up, dropping the knee which had been propped on the mattress so that his thighs pointed straight out from the bed.  He braced his hands on his legs and went still, not even drumming his fingers on anything.  He just stared into the mirror hanging from Tony’s closet door, and said nothing, lost in thought.  

Or... Tony assumed _lost in thought,_ anyway.  Might have been counting dust bunnies for all Tony knew.

Anyway, he said nothing.  

Tony’s fingers tapped against his own thigh, hidden safely out of sight by the blankets.  He wriggled his toes, too, trying to keep moving.  If he stopped too long, went still too long, the worry over what Steve was thinking would—

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

Oops, too late.  That demand had burst out of Tony without him actually deciding to say anything.  But then, he was _very_ invested.

Steve looked up.  He looked sad, like Tony had held up a kitten and set it on fire or something.  Or, no; Steve would have been angry if it were the kitten. This was officially worse than a flaming kitten.  Red letter day, here.

“Just be honest,” Tony said like it would help block the blow.  “That’s the best way.  Even if you can’t...  Even if it’s bad, it gets it over with.  I need you to just... nevermind.  Be honest with me here, Steve.  What are you thinking?”

Steve licked his lips and looked around Tony’s room one more time.  “I’m thinking, uh...  Actually, if I’m honest—what I’m thinking is, _Fuck Howard.”_

Tony lost all the air in his lungs.  He didn’t know where it had gone—it had just been there a second ago.  “What?”

Steve’s lips were moving, but Tony couldn’t quite hear.  There was a ringing in his ears, and it had nothing to do with the faint hum that came from the heating vents.  

Everyone always blamed Tony.  That was how it _worked,_ it just _was._ Hell, by this point, even _Tony_ blamed Tony.  It was easier that way.  But here, now, Steve wasn’t doing that.  When push came to shove, Steve was probably even right about why Tony was the way he was— _when push came to shove,_ ha ha ha _ha—_ but no one _ever_ went there.  

But Steve had.  Somehow.  On his first try.

Tony was this close to crying, and he couldn’t even put into words why that _was._

Steve _knew,_ though, impossible as it might be.  He couldn’t have known Howard, because Howard had been dead for nearly two decades, and that meant that Steve had been no more than ten when the accident happened.  But maybe Steve was modeling off his own family, or SHIELD had a dossier on Howard Stark.  Didn’t matter.  What _did_ matter was, Steve had guessed—instantly—that Tony’s aromanticism wasn’t just a failing, wasn’t just Tony being weak.

That was... everything.  It was _everything._

This was the first time Tony had told a lover what he was, and they _hadn’t_ told him he was _broken_ .  Even though he _was,_ really.  Didn't make it less; people were combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and knowing which factors had formed his current state didn't make it less valid.  But Steve was the first one to guess which experiences in particular had shaped this.  Everyone else just... blamed Tony.

Tony took a deep, rattling gulp, this close to shaking apart.  “If I tried again with anyone,” he admitted, “it would probably be with you.”

Steve’s body jerked again.  Tony got a front row seat to watch the hope rise, and then die again, in Steve’s eyes.  “If you did,” Steve repeated.  His mouth twisted.  “Not the same as saying you will, though.”

Tony closed his eyes, unable to watch all Steve's raw emotions, and unwilling to keep displaying his own.  “No.”

The bedroom was cool and quiet.  Tony pulled the blankets up some, covering up some of his stomach.  He put off opening his eyes for as long as he could, and even when he had to, he still avoided Steve’s gaze.  His feet were twitching like mad, twin rabbits under the covers.

It wasn't enough, the _if I could._ Not enough for Steve to stick with him, no matter how many times you turned it around.  Eventually Steve had to give up on him, and Tony desperately didn't want that.  There was no fighting it, though.  It was like a chemical reaction: iron plus oxygen plus water yields iron hydroxide—rust.  Friendship plus romance yields pain, and breaks the friendship into two component parts...  

Tony knew the moment had come when Steve stood and took a step towards the door.

“Wait!” Tony yelped, half-lunging out of the bed, then belatedly remembered he was naked and threw himself back under the covers.

Steve turned back again, posture curious.  

“I just...”  

He'd been stalling.  He just...  He really didn't want Steve to go.  Tony licked his lips, temporarily out of words— _any_ words—and then realized in a rush what he was going to say.  

“I can’t tell you not to go.  That’s not fair; I’m hurting you, you should leave, that’s 101.  But please, just... Before you go—understanding that I do, actually, care about you, in my way—”

“Tony...”  Steve was already objecting, and Tony hadn’t even gotten the request out.

“One kiss?  For the road.”  Tony smiled crookedly at the arrested look on Steve’s face.  “You want it, too.”

_“Tony...”_

“Don’t you?”  

 _One?_  Tony held a single finger up in front of himself while mouthing the word.

Steve groaned and stooped for the embrace.

Kissing Steve was always good, not least because Tony was pretty sure no one else had ever done it—or if they had, not for any length of time.  So Steve kissed like Tony’s own personal kiss-o-gram, but also like himself, and the combination was heady as a well-aged cognac.

It started with the hands.  Steve’s hands were big, big as the man himself, and he fitted one on each side of Tony’s face like those were their foredestined places in the universe.  Like a key slotting into the ignition, a buildup of potential energy, spiralling between them until the key finally turned.

Christ, he felt good.

The breath came next.  Tony’s eyes were already closing, but he could feel it, stuttering across his nose and cheeks, quick little gasps because Steve’s breathing had already gone desperate.  Steve paused two inches away; hovered there for a moment.  Tony opened his eyes, not quite willing to beg but damned well getting there fast.

Steve lowered his lips to Tony’s.

The kiss was soft.  Reverent.  A moment of hush, everything going silent around them, or at least seeming that way.  Steve’s lips were firm and strong, just as Tony had known they would be.

It was hard to say goodbye.  He was going to miss this.

Tony surged upward, face bumping out of Steve’s grasp, and deepened the kiss.  He swept into Steve’s mouth, took over, bit down on Steve’s lower lip like an asshole...  Steve moaned and melted for it, which was—fuck, oh god, oh _Steve..._

Tony’s hands were going wild now, out of the sheets, grabbing Steve by the hair, hauling him in closer.  He was out of control, appetite and yearning, but it only made sense: if this was the last taste he got of Steve, he was going to make sure the bite was a big one.

Steve looked wrecked by the time Tony was done with him, his mouth swollen and red.  His cheeks were pink, the rest of his skin pale with desire.  His hellaciously attractive uniform had an obvious bulge below the belt.  Tony almost went for it, but...  No; no. There were things that were too far, and he knew, instinctively, that was one of them.

Steve had one knee on the bed again, pinning the blanket next to Tony’s hip.  He slowly slid it off.  He stood on his own two feet again, breathing fast.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said finally.  “I’m going to stay your friend, Tony.  That’s why we can’t have sex; I can’t do both, I’ll go mad with it.  And I’d rather stop the sex than the friendship.”

Wait.

Tony's mind skidded to a halt precisely as sharp as if it'd reached the end of a tether. 

_What?!_

Steve turned his back and left, not looking back despite the humiliating sounds Tony was making, and Tony quietly had the world's most grateful panic attack behind him.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated tags reflect a scene of Tony/Others, but no cheating, because he's not in a relationship with Steve when the scene occurs. YMMV, but it's the only scene I have planned for the fic which is Tony/Others and it's not super explicit or anything, so if it's a dealbreaker you can just skip to the next chapter once that scene comes on.

STRIKE had had a handler:  Marcus Smeiville, an ex-Operations specialist who had been paralyzed on a mission in Yemen twenty years ago.  Rather than retire, Smeiville had become an Analytics man, and had monitored every step of STRIKE’s ops from his chair.  

Now he was in the Fridge, the high-tech SHIELD jail, because Agent Coulson had been standing next to him at the monitors when Steve started taking out STRIKE agents.  Coulson had figured it out faster, and had taken away Smeiville’s biggest advantage before Smeiville even knew what was happening to his men: he had tipped the chair over, spilling Smeiville out onto the floor, and after that there was very little fighting to be done.

But with Smeiville behind bars—or forcefields, or whatever SHIELD was using—and STRIKE either beside him or six feet under, Steve was at loose ends for both a team and a handler.  Fury solved the matter not by giving Steve a new collection of agents, but by joining him onto one that already existed: Strike Team Delta.

Strike Team Delta was not-so-affectionately nicknamed Strike Team  _ Disaster  _ among the upper echelons of SHIELD leadership—that was Fury, Hill, Hand, and the like.  Steve hadn’t been the most thrilled ever when he heard that was where he was going to land.  Victoria Hand was the one who reassured him about the assignment, and even she did so backhanded while briefing him:  “I tried to talk him out of it,” she said in her usual impersonal way, “but Fury was dead set on putting you with Team Disaster.  Good luck.”

Thing was, Steve trusted Fury’s judgement, possibly more than he should.  If this was Fury’s brainchild... Well, then the least Steve could do was give it an honest try.

Natasha Romanoff was on the short side, curvy and so gorgeous she made Steve’s teeth hurt.  And she was ruthlessly clever—no amount of mascara and shadow around bottomless green eyes could conceal the intelligence there.  The first time Steve saw her smile—her  _ real  _ smile—he instantly knew that if she’d been a brunette, he would’ve been in some real trouble. __

She didn’t talk much at the beginning.  Only spoke about the missions, and even that only when she had to.  She didn’t share anything personal whatsoever. Infuriatingly, Clint Barton didn’t seem to need her to.  

The file Steve was given said that Barton had been working with Romanoff since converting her to SHIELD’s cause in the  late nineties—which, since she was born in 1984, seemed fairly improbable. She would barely have been old enough to drink at the time.  But however long it had  _ actually  _ been, Barton and Romanoff seemed to work on the same wavelength.  If Romanoff  _ barely  _ talked on missions, Barton  _ never  _ did.  He watched Steve with deep suspicion, and the only words he uttered were when Steve asked him a direct question over the comms.  Other than that, if Barton  _ had  _ to communicate about the mission, he used ASL to do it.  

Steve didn’t know ASL.  He was damned sure going to learn it  _ now,  _ though!  

In the meantime, Romanoff was translating.  She always had a faint smirk tucked into the corner of her mouth when she did it, though, so Steve was taking those translations with a pretty big helping of salt.

Coulson’s face wore dryer and dryer expressions the longer they worked together, and Steve was increasingly convinced he was the subject of an elaborate joke.  Coulson was Strike Team Delta’s handler, the only handler who hadn’t refused to work with them for longer than two months—Hill had told Steve that, right before she shoved her hand in her mouth and left Steve’s office quickly.  Coulson was generally very polite to Steve—which Steve appreciated—but he always gave off the impression that there was something he wasn’t saying.

None the three called Steve anything but  _ Captain  _ or  _ Cap. _

“It’s frustrating,” Steve complained now, leaning back and tucking his feet through the rungs of the stool he was sitting on.  He was talking about his situation, in the most vague terms possible, to Tony. 

They were in Tony’s garage, where Tony was working on the engine of a car.  Steve wasn’t sure what kind of car it was, but it was low-bodied, sleek, and curvy, and even before Tony had gotten to it the engine had been loud and powerful:  the car equivalent of Natasha, which was why Steve had brought the subject up. 

“I have good instincts,” Steve explained.  “Not just a brag, or the kind of everybody-thinks-they- do thing; I really do.  We’ve tested it. And every instinct I have says, I can trust my new team.”

Tony said something around the piece of metal—Steve was pretty sure they were screws, but they might have been bolts—in his mouth.  The words were unintelligible, but the tone was clear enough.

“So I  _ don’t  _ trust my team, is the problem!  The one I was talking about, she’s a  _ spy. _  She has always  _ been  _ a spy.  And the other one doesn’t give me... anything.  He doesn’t  _ talk.   _ The third one guy I trust well enough, but the first two are the ones I have to put at my back, you know?  Especially the girl.”

Tony shifted a bolt into his hand and reached back into the engine.  “‘Y ‘er?”

Steve thought about it as he watched Tony manipulate the inner workings of the engine.  He would have loved to go into more detail—a lot more detail—but in a lot of ways, his lips were perforce sealed.

The biggest part he couldn’t say was, he had to be careful because they already knew SHIELD was infested with HYDRA.  The chain of intel that had been recovered after Steve busted STRIKE had been useful, but there were still approximately a thousand HYDRA agents they hadn’t caught yet, just in the worldwide organization of SHIELD.  There were more in the government. 

Natasha’s greatest ability—her file had been explicitly clear—was in deception.  

And Steve had already been fooled once.

But over and over again, he had proven he could trust his instincts...

“I think I’m just worrying,” he decided eventually.  “She’s good—she  _ could  _ fool me—but that doesn’t mean she  _ will.” _

Tony grunted noncommittally and held his hand up for a wrench.

 

* * *

 

Steve had started to notice some things in the two months since he and Tony had...

And right away, his words failed him, because he and Tony had never been  _ together,  _ not really.  They had been friends with benefits, and the whole trouble started when Steve had started wanting more than that.  But that didn’t change the fact that he had certain feelings for Tony, and it didn’t change the fact that their relationship _ had been _ one thing, and now it was another.  

But he couldn’t call it a breakup, because they hadn’t been together.  And he couldn’t say their friendship had ended, because—thank God—it hadn’t.  And yet, there had definitely been a change, there. A dissolution of the old, and the beginnings of something new...

At any rate, one of the things Steve had noticed since the not-a-breakup was this:  Tony seemed to have mentally re-sorted him. 

Before, Tony had invited him to hang out primarily alone.  If there were other people there, they were Darsh and Nikki, and of course Jun.  Now, though, Tony almost never invited Steve to come over alone—and not only because Jun was living with him.  Usually Jim Rhodes was there as well. Steve definitely didn’t mind that part: Jim was a solid guy, reliable and level-headed.  But hanging out with Tony and Jim was fundamentally different from hanging out with Tony, Darsh and Nikki. With the latter group, there was always something seething, some undercurrent that felt like an ambush.  Steve had never been able to identify it when he and Tony were... 

_ Aaaargh!  Words!!! _

...At any rate, it wasn’t until Steve and Tony were definitely  _ not with benefits  _ that Steve was able to realize what that simmering tension had been:  Tony slept with Nikki and Darsh. Not all the time, obviously—because hello, that was why he’d hooked up with Steve—and not at all while Steve and Tony were...  _ with benefits...  _ because Tony had told Steve that he didn’t need to re-test.  But at some point, it  _ had  _ happened, and—Steve could see the writing on the wall, inevitable as a final domino—with Steve unavailable, it would now happen again.

The day he figured that one out, Steve went through fifteen heavy bags in a row.  

But now he and Tony were...  _ not with benefits...  _ and now, Jim was suddenly there all the time.  This was despite living just off of Edwards Air Force base, where he was technically stationed; if Tony weren’t including Steve, he and Jim could have hung out at Tony’s house in Malibu.  

But the two of them  _ were  _ including Steve, and Steve was discovering that he liked that.  Jim reminded him a little of Bucky, mostly in the way he was so prosaic and unproblematic.  He also had a dry wit that paired  _ very  _ nicely with Steve’s own.  What he  _ didn’t _ have issues, at least not anything like a towering mountain of daddy issues—and when he was around Jim, Tony suddenly had fewer issues, too.  Steve appreciated that on a level that shed just a little too much light on how besotted he was. 

Thing was, evenings with Tony and Jim were  _ fun.   _ That was the long and short of it, really.  The last time Steve had really felt like this, it had been in a pub surrounded by the Howling Commandos, and since the ice, he had truly believed this kind of companionship had been lost to him forever.  The first time he realized it  _ wasn’t, _ he almost spilled his beer he was so startled.  

After that, Steve considered Jim Rhodes a friend in his own right, not just as an extension of Tony.  And Steve figured Jim felt the same way when he invited him out to a hockey game.

“Tony doesn’t do sports,” Jim explained as they made their way through the turnstile.  “He can—he follows the highlights for conversing with his business-y set—but he always gets bored halfway through.  One time he even fell asleep at a Yankees game.”

“I... do not do that,” Steve said cautiously.

Jim gave him the hairy eyeball.  “...You get overinvested and shout at all the players, don’t you.”

“Now  _ that  _ is maybe something I might have done.  Once or twice.”  _ Per inning,  _ he added silently,  _ every game that Bucky and I ever went to.  _

“Well, you’ll have a lot to shout about,” Jim said, shaking his head.  “Welcome to being a Caps fan—”

“A  _ what?!” _

“The Caps—Washington Capitals.   They outscored every other team in the league last year, only to be defeated in the first round of playoffs by an eighth-seeded team.”

Steve thought about that as he passed a handful of singles to the girl selling beer.  “...Is it too late to root for the other guys?”

Rhodey clapped a hand on Steve’s shoulder in sympathy and steered them towards their seats.

 

* * *

 

Steve’s apartment was in Dupont Circle, an area that Steve as a young man would definitely have called  _ bougie.   _ It showed in the sidewalks, clean and with a sharp-edged line between them and the grass.  It showed in the clothes, and the makes and models of the cars. And it showed in the number of joggers out running at seven in the morning.

There weren’t a ridiculous number; it didn’t exactly look like there was an everyday footrace going.  But there were enough that you didn’t remember faces too often, enough that the runners blended together into anonymity.  Especially if you didn’t keep pace with them—which Steve didn’t, because if he slowed down that much, there wouldn’t be any point to being out here at all.

The only times he kept pace with anyone, in fact, was on the tail end of his run:  the warm-down, they had called it at SHIELD. Rollins from the STRIKE team had sworn by the warm down to keep muscles from seizing, but then, Rollins was dead now—shot and left bleeding in the gray West Virginia coal dust—so Steve supposed he could take Rollins’s opinions with a heaping serving of salt.  

Still:  bougie area, lots of runners...  It took Steve two months to start recognizing the long-legged black man from previous runs.  

Long Legs was a runner, not a jogger—a distinction that mattered to Steve, and probably to Long Legs.  Long Legs probably did races, although maybe not competitively. Steve had seen enough of running culture to know that was a thing.  Long Legs had a route of unknown length, but by the time he came around to the Mall he was well warmed up and hitting his stride. Steve was usually within the last few miles of his own run when he reached the Mall, and so for a while they would progress at similar paces.

The first thing Steve noticed about Long Legs was a nod.

They were coming up west on Independence Avenue, ambling at a gentle six miles per hour—or, well, that was how Steve felt it, anyway—and they passed the World War II memorial.  Steve always avoided looking at that, tried to pretend he didn’t see the fountains arching their way towards the sky like rocket trails. They felt dishonest, somehow; like if he were going to engage with the memorial, he should have just died in the war.  So he was determinedly looking away, studying the back of the runner in front of him, watching the way Long Legs kept his chest up and swung his feet like someone was calling a cadence behind him.

Long Legs turned his face and nodded towards the monument, a single respectful gesture.

It was a shock to Steve.  He had assumed most folks just passed the monument like it was any other kind of scenery.  It instantly changed the way he looked at the other runner and brought Long Legs into sharp focus against the blurry backdrop of early morning joggers.  

Long Legs kept his head up and his gait steady after that, pounding westward towards the Lincoln Memorial.  He nodded again when they passed the rough-hewn white blocks of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and kept running on his way, faded green shirt slowly changing hues in the light of the rising sun.  

As they passed the Lincoln memorial, Long Legs turned around the building, following the circular sidewalk around and, presumably, back towards wherever he started from, while Steve continued on northward.  But that single moment of recognition, the somber nod from someone who was obviously a veteran—that gait didn’t lie—the acknowledgement from someone who had, albeit in a different year,  _ been there...  _ it stuck with Steve, tangling with something he had been carefully not disturbing since freeing himself of Dr. Chan.  

The next time he followed Long Legs, Steve recognized him.

 

* * *

 

He wouldn’t have said anything if it weren’t for Rhodey.  It was one thing to make friends with Tony: Tony deeply appreciated Steve’s cock, and anyway Tony was a law to himself.  Rhodey was more normal—for a genius veteran colonel who occasionally flew across the country just to hang with a mutual friend, anyway.  Eventually, a few days—okay, weeks—after realizing he and Jim Rhodes were friends in their own right, Steve also realized that he could have—it was a real shocker— _ more friends,  _ if he wanted.  And not just Tony’s friends,  _ his own.   _

Of course, that would require him to crawl out of his shell and make them...  

There was no Dr. Chan to goad him into action now, and for a while he circled, trying to figure out which way to turn.  

He seriously considered trying to make friends with Romanoff and Barton:  they were his team, after all, and it would have made things a bit easier at work.  But something stubborn rose up within him at the thought of breaking first. Romanoff and Barton were the ones putting up barriers.  

Steve had  _ seen  _ Barton, once, joking around with another agent, a stocky, long-haired guy with a Texan drawl.  The two were cracking wise about—if Steve had contextualized correctly—country music, and there was no ASL to be seen.  That meant the dour, strictly-professional persona Barton was bringing out around Steve was a fake, a front for someone he didn’t trust, and Steve was just childish enough to say that meant Barton had Started It.  

Well, Barton could also finish it—and Romanoff, too.  She was backing this nonsense by not calling it out, maybe even playing into it.  Both of them could go hang.

But Long Legs...

Steve caught up to him on the Mall one day, passing him at a fraction of the pace he could have done, and all of a sudden the plan unfolded inside him.  He slowed as soon as he thought of it, matching his pace to Long Legs’, jogging along a mere fifteen feet ahead of him. 

Long Legs let him, for a minute, running in his own zone, until he realized what had happened:  Steve had come up behind him, fast; passed him; and then  _ slowed  _ to stay just in front of him, tauntingly.  

Now,  _ that  _ was rude—not super rude, but at least a little rude.  Long Legs sped up. 

Fifteen feet narrowed to twelve.

Steve sped up, too.  Twelve feet expanded to fifteen.

One minute passed, both of them pounding around the head of the Reflecting Pool as a bicolored sunrise reflected off the water.  

Long Legs sped up again.  Steve sped up again, too.

Fifteen feet.

They curved around the Memorial, and the right turn for 23rd street approached.  Long Legs wouldn’t go that way; he always circled the Memorial and headed back south again.  If Steve turned right, this would end.

Steve turned left and sped up again, faster and faster as Long Legs pounded along behind.

“Oh,  _ come on!”   _

He heard the moment Long Legs stopped holding back, pelting after Steve without any consideration for the length he had remaining to run.  His footsteps grew loud and Steve didn’t speed up this time, just veered off onto the grass. He dodged up the slight hill and Long Legs followed, climbing with impressive stamina, working his way to the side when he got too close behind Steve to run comfortably there.  Steve couldn’t make himself lose the impromptu race—maybe he was an asshole, but it just wasn’t in him—but he didn’t race ahead any faster, either. They reached the top of the slope at the exact same time, and when Long Legs stopped and stooped over, hands propped on his thighs and sides heaving, Steve stopped beside him.

It was only then that he realized how wide was the grin on his face.

Long Legs shot him an unimpressed sideways look as they stood panting, then stuck his hand out.  “Sam Wilson,” he said abruptly.

“Steve Rogers.” 

And if Steve was grinning more broadly than ever as he shook Sam Wilson’s hand, well, there was no one else there to call him out on it.

 

* * *

 

The sky was overcast when Tony rang the doorbell, but it hadn’t actually started raining.  It was scheduled to: an entire weekend of thunderstorms, fading to sleet and possibly hail.  But although he had driven through a drizzle on the way over, for the moment, standing on the stoop, Tony was dry.

Darsh opened the door himself, dressed to give a man a heart attack in black denim jeans that fit like a second skin.  He was wearing a fuck ton of jewelry and no shirt. In addition to bracelets, necklaces, anklets, and piercings in his nose and ears, he had a diamond stud standing proud through each nipple, and a thin gold chain connected the left one to enormous hoop through his left ear.  He was not wearing shoes.

Tony’s pulse kicked up, switching over from nerves to arousal.  This was going to be good.

Darsh led Tony through the house, although it wasn’t a complicated a path and Tony had been there before.  He seated Tony in the living room across from Nikki, who was already lounged like a queen in a high-backed armchair.  

She was wearing what could only be described as a ballgown:  it had a close-fitting bodice with a low, swoopy sort of neckline, and a full—but slinky—skirt with a deliciously high slit.  The flippy sleeves did nothing either for structural support or coverage. The dress was a deep burgundy that did wonders to showcase the rich, warm hue of Nikki’s skin.  It also perfectly matched her aggressively glossy lipstick. Her shoes were pointy Louis Vuitton things with a heel that could do substantial damage. Tony’s pulse kicked up again as Nikki casually showed off the stilettos of them by crossing her legs. 

There was a tea set on the table, the porcelain elaborately scrolled but unpainted, next to an unlabeled black cardboard box—square, about six inches on a side.  Nikki leaned forward and poured him a cup of tea, dark and orange. The splash of it was loud in the otherwise silent room. She added a dash of milk and passed it over.   She did not mention or motion towards the box.

The tea tasted like  _ Nikki and Darsh:   _ different, yes, but familiar, safe, and good.

They made smalltalk as they drank, Nikki politely curious, Darsh happily snarking.  Tony remembered thinking, a couple months ago, about coming over here... They had invited him for a visit back in the fall.  But he had decided then that this would take more thought and care than he wanted to give, and sometimes he was so wrong he could kick himself.  Which way, exactly, had involved more caring, again...? 

As they discussed Nikki’s promotion at the hospital—well-deserved—and Darsh’s latest project—“I’ll want some help from you, when we’re all done with the weekend.”—Tony relaxed, easing into the familiar rhythms of being non-essential.  Darsh and Nikki were a couple, and they would be just fine if Tony never slept with them again. A fucking  _ relief,  _ to be honest, and it was for precisely that reason that Tony was willing to do this.

They reached the end of the tea and Nikki set her cup down on her saucer with a clink.  “I was surprised you agreed to come today.” She set the saucer on the coffee table and leaned back in the sprawling armchair, recrossing her knees in such a way that the slit in her skirt showed off the sleek curves of her calves.  

“I was in town,” Tony said, “and it  _ is  _ the weekend.  I wasn’t doing anything else.”  He easily  _ could  _ have been doing something else, but he’d needed the release.  And Nikki and Darsh were old friends.

Too old of friends, and too familiar with Tony’s ways, to be tricked, although Nikki did stand and gesture him to his feet.  “I expected you to be at home fucking Steve,” she said, going directly for the kill as always. She picked up the cardboard box from the table and opened it to reveal a collar:  black leather and silver loops. 

Tony shook his hands loose at his side and lifted his chin for the leather.  He shot for a casual tone as he said, “Steve and I aren’t screwing anymore.”

Nikki paused in the act of opening the silver catch.  Something surprised and worried flickered in her eyes, tucked behind the hard mask that she wore for these sorts of encounters.  She  _ was  _ still a friend...  “Why not?” she asked.

Tony shrugged.  Darsh had filled the shelves of their bookcases with—in addition to all the books—the trappings of his family, tiny gods and goddess sitting among a forest of candles on one shelf, photographs of Darsh’s kin on another.  Tony didn’t lack for points to look at. “He developed feelings,” Tony explained to a miniature Ganesha. “Got too invested.”

Nikki frowned and—score!—passed Darsh the collar to buckle around Tony’s throat, shaking off the moment of whatever-it-had-been.  “That  _ is  _ a shame,” she mused as Darsh took the opportunity to press full-length against Tony from the back.  “I liked that one. I rather thought he might last.” She clicked her tongue in disappointment as Darsh finished smoothing the front loop into the notch at the base of Tony’s neck.  

“Yeah, well...”  Tony didn’t really have anything to add after that, and hoped she would change the subject.

“I thought he was a bit more quality than to stomp off in a huff, though.”  

She gestured, and Darsh unzipped Tony’s leather jacket before pulling it down over his shoulders.  Tony wasn’t wearing anything fancy underneath:  band logo t-shirt and dark jeans, both well fitted but not plastered on.  

“He didn’t,” Tony instinctively defended.  Then he realized that meant he would have to say more and continued as Darsh bent to ease him out of his shoes and socks.  “That is, he said he had... feelings... and he couldn’t do both, so he chose to stay my friend, but  _ not...”   _

Nikki’s sculpted eyebrows were up.  It had made so much more sense when Steve said it.

Tony closed his eyes and tried again.  “Steve felt that continuing to have sex would be too much like making love, and chose to stop our relations before he could grow enough resentment to poison the friendship, too.”  He opened his eyes and glanced at the little Ganesha again. Hopefully that had been enough to hold her.

Except, no, of course it wasn’t.  Nikki instructed Darsh to take Tony’s arms.  There was nothing in those instructions about Darsh wrapping himself around Tony like an octopus, but that was basically how Darsh did it:  he pulled Tony’s arms behind his back and wrapped his own around them, kicked Tony’s legs apart and stepped forward between them so that Tony was forced to either lean against him or fall down.  The move pressed them against each other all down the length of their torsos, back to front. Darsh’s diamond studs and cock were three points of hardness through the thin barrier of Tony’s clothes.

Nikki grabbed Tony’s chin and dug her nails in—not enough to break skin, just enough to hurt.  Tony’s eyes snapped up to meet hers reflexively, and as soon as they did, she smiled. Her teeth were white within the dark slickness of her lipstick.  His stomach turned over like a cold engine. 

The game was starting.  

“And you just accepted that?”  She asked it in a tone that said she already knew the answer he would give, and already knew it was a lie, but she was a kind Domme and was hoping he would save himself.  Tony cringed and wrestled with it as Darsh’s breath puffed warm and soft against the side of his neck. 

He licked his lips, tongue passing within inches of Nikki's thumb, and took a breath.  “I accepted it,” he said slowly, “because I was scared.”

Nikki raised her brow higher and waited. 

“...Of losing him for good,” Tony finished.

Nikki blinked once, slow and unimpressed.  She let go of his chin—his face stung where her nails had dug in—and dropped her hand away long enough for him to straight up slightly.

Then she slapped him.  Open-handed, and not hard—just enough to sting a little.  Darsh’s hands clenched around Tony’s arms at the sight, or maybe at the sound.  “Don’t lie to me,” she snarled at him.

Tony’s blood was racing through his veins, adrenaline kicking up.  Nikki didn’t care about Steve, he reminded himself. He could lose sight of that.  There was a reason she was asking these things, but it had less to do with Steve than with digging her thumbs into Tony’s weak points.  A quick reaction—he could give her that. 

“I didn’t want to lose him!” he protested.  “What do you want me to say? He’s a good man—”  

“He is.  A good  _ enough  _ man to have been willing to compromise.”

Darsh’s grip tightened warningly, but Tony really didn’t care.  “You met him  _ three times,  _ you can’t know—and compromise on  _ what?   _ He wants a boyfriend; he told me so.  And I’m not—” Tony had to pause a moment to catch his breath.  “I’m not boyfriend material.”

She slapped him again.  Tony felt Darsh’s cock twitch where it ground against his ass.  “You may have been scared,” Nikki snapped, “but you were also relieved—the same as you were when you and Jun broke up.  Because you didn’t—no!” Tony had jerked in Darsh’s grasp, an instinctual attempt to get away. Nikki wrapped her hand into Tony’s hair and pulled tightly in response.  “You were  _ relieved,”  _ she insisted.   _ “Tell me why.” _

Nikki’s hand was pulling hard against his scalp and Darsh’s breath was ragged in his ear, and Tony was standing barefoot in a plush Persian rug in the middle of their living room with nowhere to go and no one who would come running.  This was the humiliation act, the worst part of the ritual, but that was all it was.  They would have stopped in an instant if he had asked them to honestly, but that was why he was safe instead to open his mouth and blurt out truth: “Because I don’t like to fuck people who love me!”

It didn’t earn him even a second of her mercy.  Nikki’s grip tightened. 

Tony gasped.  He gave into the temptation to arch backward, grinding his ass and shoulders back against Darsh.   _ God  _ this was painful, in more ways than one.  But the pull of her hand in his hair felt so good, and Darsh’s breath was ragged in his ear...

Nikki leaned into his moment of weakness, figuratively and also literally.  She was a couple inches taller even without the shoes, and it was no trouble for her to lean in, getting her mouth close to his face.   _ “Why not?”  _ she prompted again, and this time it took Tony a second to go back over the conversation and remember what she was asking.

“No!”  He thrashed for real this time, trying to squirm free, but between them Nikki and Darsh held him tight.  He thought for a wild, desperate moment about using his safeword, but... That would ruin the whole weekend, was the thing.  And this part wouldn’t last very long; the whole point of making him squirm was to rile up Darsh, and judging by the sounds and feelings coming from behind him, that was working pretty fucking well.  Tony clenched his eyes shut and forced himself into stillness, his breath ripping ragged out of his chest. 

He could get through this part.  He  _ could.   _

He opened his eyes and tensed them at the corners, blinking until the tears sprang up.  Nikki loved it when he cried. And if he was doing it for her, then he didn’t need to be embarrassed.  

“Because it’s... awful,” he said finally.  The thing she wanted him to say out loud, and it  _ was  _ awful, but it’d be over quick.  He felt almost broken open as he answered, but in that raw way that promised an excellent, excellent weekend.  He shuddered and sagged in Darsh’s grip. “Sleeping with someone who loves me is... It’s like a question you keep getting asked, over and over, and every time you go to answer you’re struck  _ mute.   _ It’s like being a well that always runs dry whenever somebody drops a fucking bucket in you.”

Darsh sucked in air behind him and shifted his grip to something more like a hug.  Nikki’s face softened into her Patient Domme look again and she smoothed her fingers over his cheek.  She kissed him softly, without tongue, once, and then again. A reward for his cooperation. “So once you knew Steve loved you,” she murmured, “you didn’t want him anymore.”

Tony whimpered and jerked, at the softness in her voice and at the electric sensation of Darsh suckling his earlobe.  He desperately didn’t want to contradict her—didn’t want to lose the softness he’d earned—but... she  _ had  _ asked.  “...No,” he admitted.

Everything stopped.  Nikki drew back, the calm before the storm.  “...No?”

“No,” Tony repeated, more firmly now.  “I... I know he loves me, now. I know that, okay?  It was—you didn’t see his  _ face.   _ It was clear.  It was... It was too fucking clear.  But I still... I wanted him anyway.” Tony remembered the look on Steve’s face, too raw, and the way it’d made him want to wrap himself around Steve and sooth all the hurt away.  “I still do. I  _ still _ want him. __ But not—”  Blue eyes full of emotion, lush mouth twisted in pain.  “—not enough. Not the right way, and not enough.”

And it fucking  _ ached.   _ Tony squeezed his eyes shut, then blinked them again.  More tears for Nikki. Wasn’t he kind?

Nikki sighed and stepped closer, smoothing her thumbs over his cheeks again.  “Oh, Tony...” 

She kissed him, soothing and deep, possessive.  As if that had been a signal, Darsh started pulling Tony’s pants open from behind.  He pressed kisses to Tony’s shoulders as he worked, his mouth hot through the thin fabric of Tony’s t-shirt. 

“Don’t worry, darling.”  His voice was rough, his hands clever as they worked Tony’s pants down over his hips.  “We’re not going to ask you for anything you’re not able to give...”

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Billy Joel, "You May Be Right," a very Stony sort of song: https://youtu.be/aoyAg75PsTA
> 
> _Remember how I found you there_  
>  _Alone in your electric chair_  
>  _I told you dirty jokes until you smiled_  
>  _You were lonely for a man_  
>  _I said take me as I am_  
>  _'Cause you might enjoy some madness for a while_


End file.
